


The Smashterns

by eaglgenes101



Category: Super Smash Brothers
Genre: Am I tagging right?, Gen, Humor, Implied Sexual Content, Interns & Internships, Loads and Loads of Characters - Freeform, Semi-Serious, Slice of Life, Summer, Workplace
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-03
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-04-29 18:19:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 43,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5137829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eaglgenes101/pseuds/eaglgenes101
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Master Hand decides to hire some interns to the Smash Mansion over the summer. Everything that could logically result from such a decision, does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sunday, June 5

**Author's Note:**

> I've tried my best to maintain the characterization of each character, but for the sake of variety, tried to adapt them into something somewhat different. So don't be too surprised if you see something different.

Master hand's booming, omnipresent voice could be heard all throughout the Smash mansion that Sunday. 

"Attention, all Smashers. Please go to the theater by 6 PM. I have an announcement to give."

The theater where the announcement would be was in the basement, while everyone lived upstairs. Smashers, for the most part, could go wherever they wanted, but for practical reasons, almost everyone confined their private activities to their rooms, and their social activities to a number of nearby rooms whose function as social activity rooms arose organically over the decade and a half the Smash Mansion had residents. 

Some of the Smashers were prompt. Mewtwo, who was doing nothing in particular at 5:30 PM, was the first to the theater. Mewtwo was soon followed by Zelda and Greninja, who, like him, had warped into the theater without much to do. Meta Knight, who had just finished sharpening and polishing his gear when the announcement came up, appeared several seconds after the first three, but still managed to have a significant lead on number 5. 

Palutena might have been the fifth one there if she used her warp power on herself, but she spent her time warping Pit and Dark Pit to the kitchen first and watched them scramble around confused in the unfamiliar maze of metal equipment and smells. It was just a joke that she couldn't resist. 

Pit and Dark Pit wandered around the kitchen, trying to find an exit. They swiftly bumped into Mr. Game and Watch, who just finished cooking up his newest 2-dimensional food creation. As a group of three, they all walked out of the kitchen, with Mr. Game and Watch followed by the other two. Thankfully for them, the kitchen was just a hallway away from the theater. This made Mr. Game and Watch, Pit, and Dark Pit 5th, 6th, and 7th, respectively. With her joke completed, Palutena then teleported to the theater. Number 8 she became. 

After them, the next several Smashers to the theater were the ones that budgeted enough time to move ahead of schedule, and left for the theater at least ten minutes before the announcement was to be given. The stairs and elevators became packed as Smashers continued streaming down into the basement floor, causing some of them to be late. The dash down to the theater was chaotic, but the consensus was that Little Mac made it down first, because of his fast dash speed. Whether it really was, no one bothered to check. 

Finally, the rest gradually poured out of the stairs and elevators. Most of them decided to leave right at 6, rather than plan on being there at that time, but some had their own reasons for not being so prompt. Mario had his doctor coat on, and was still treating Wii Fit Trainer for a sprain she experienced while doing an exercise class. Robin was double checking her tomes for wear, and Marth and Ike were in the middle of a training match with each other. 

At last, Kirby joined the others in the theater, and after Master Hand double checked that everyone was in the theater, he made his announcement. 

"Sorry to call you to attention on such short notice, but I have good news. Everyone, please give a big welcome for the new Smash interns!"

From the back on the theater, just as promised, a hundred and fifty different high school and college students filled up the back seats of the theater. The three Mii fighters looked at each other. They, too, were ordinary people that had successfully risen the ranks to become Smashers. Were there going to be more of them soon? 

"Over the past several years, I have received multiple complaints. That I have unduly disadvantaged ordinary people that don't have another world to claim fame in. That I have promoted already famous fighters rather than cultivating rising stars.

To address this criticism, I have partnered with an internship firm to bring ordinary people into the Smash mansion. Some of them will help maintain and improve the advanced equipment that you have come to rely on in training and matches. Others will be paired with you and help you train. And still others are fighters in their own right, and will be fighting alongside you all."

Upon hearing the last sentence, the three Mii fighters did a high fifteen. They had lobbied Master Hand to make Smash more accessible to outsiders ever since they entered the doors of the Smash mansion, and today was the day that their tireless work finally yielded results. 

"This summer, 150 bright, young minds will join you in the Smash mansion. Most of them are enthusiastic Smash fans, and many are eager to see how Smash runs behind the scenes. They are here to apply the skills that they have learned in their years of education."

Palutena slowly formed a grin. Looking at her expression, Pit and Dark Pit knew what she was probably going to do. More inexperienced people in the Smash mansion meant more people to mess around with, and Palutena knew exactly how to do so. 

Master Hand continued. "Interns, before you got here, you should have received a sheet outlining the agreements you are making by interning here. If you haven't already, please come to the front to get one."

A few interns walked up to front to get extra copies of the agreements sheet. They waved at the smashers, some of whom waved back. 

"To summarize, over the next three months, I will be giving each of you challenging assignments to help you apply what you've learned over the years at school. We are bound by law to make this internship a good learning experience for all of you, and to this end I have provided important information about what we can and can't do on the agreement. Do please read it.

Most of you will be laboring here from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Do check your sheet for details though, since those hours do not apply to all of you. Meals are served 3 times a day all week. You are free to, and are encouraged to, explore the Smash Mansion within reasonable common-sense limits." 

Lucina looked at Robin and Chrom, saying, "Master Hand is sure being serious about his future prospects here. He's taken the extra mile to make his newest interns comfortable here, certainly more than what I saw when I was considering apprenticeships."

Chrom looked at her without responding, causing Lucina to remark, "Hey, I didn't know better."

"If you think you might be unavailable during the hours you are scheduled to be at the Smash Mansion, please try to contact me as soon as possible so none of us are wondering where you are."

Wario, who was positioned in the middle of the theater despite his frequent bathroom habits, excused himself, forcing Rosalina, Luigi, Marth, and Shulk to stand up to let him pass. He let out a waft near the exit of the theater, causing the interns to cluster towards the other side of the theater. 

"Please respect our property and secrets, and do follow common sense and common decency both inside the Smash mansion and out."

Samus, whose option of the interns couldn't be determined from her lack of expression, muttered,"Well, I at least can anticipate more attention being directed at the Smash mansion. Scandal emerging in 20… 19… 18… 17… 16… "

"I am enthusiastic about what all of you can contribute to the Smash mansion, and I hope that you are enthusiastic too! Who's ready to start?" shouted Master Hand. 

A large, enthusiastic cry emerged from the back of the room from the interns. At this time, the presentation finished, and the Smashers, assist trophies, and some other regular visitors of the Smash Mansion, directed by Peach, directed the interns to a large room. The Mii brawler was sure about what was happening until she directed everyone into a large circle and sat everyone down. Then, at that point, something clicked in his mind: Peach was going to do an introduction circle with all of them. 

As the crowd of hundreds settled down, Peach proclaimed, "We smashers, living, fighting, and training under the same roof, have bonded together like one big extended family. Our ranks have grown considerably since the days when Master Hand rented hotel rooms for the 12 fighters who were brave enough to fight under Master Hand's then-new Smash Combat system, but our bonds still remain strong as ever. We've always welcomed new fighters as they came, and we should give similar treatment to our new interns."

Understandably, Meta Knight found this comparison of the Smash to an extended family cutesy, but kept his reaction confined to behind his mask. No one found out until Meta Knight, weeks later, told everyone about it. 

"This is a tradition we've maintained since Super Smash Bros's first days. We've positioned you all in a circle, and distributed all the newcomers evenly inside the circle. And one, by one, we proceed around the circle clockwise and introduce ourselves. Since we have so many people here, each person gets just 15 seconds to come up with and give their introduction. I'll start. I'm Peach, also known as Princess Toadstool, princess of the Mushroom kingdom. I'm the princess that Bowser keeps kidnapping and that Mario keeps saving."

At this point, it dawned to him that this giant introduction circle wasn't a good idea. There were more newcomers than there were smashers, and most of them wouldn't be staying for more than three months. Peach didn't share his opinion, however, and her cheery demeanor enraptured most of the interns, causing that concern to lose any momentum it once had. 

"I'm Arwin. I'm currently a sophomore studying Electrical Engineering at Indiana State. I don't really know what Smash is, but from the description of the internship, it sounded nice, so I went up ahead." 

"I'm Stacy. I come from Des Moines. Anyway, I just finished my Junior year in High School, and I'm aiming for a spot in one of the many state universities in the United States." 

"Pikachu, Pi, chu, Pikapi..."

Red stood up to interpret the pokemon.

"That little guy is Pikachu. He was my first pokemon, and though I don't fight in Smash Battles, Master Hand keeps me around here to help watch over them. He was one of the original twelve to be in the original Smash team."

"Ellen here. I come from a small town in Oklahoma. My parents trained me to use a rifle when I was thirteen, and encouraged me to practice since then. I've just completed high school, and I plan to enlist in the U.S. Army next fall."

"My name's Carles. I've lived in Arizona since early childhood, but it took me forever to find enough official documentation to apply for this internship. Next year will be my second and last year before I get my Associate's Degree in Marketing."

"I am Pit, commander of the Centurion Army and Palutena's right hand man since time immemorial. Though I revel in doing what's right to the best of my ability, it sure is tiring to take out armies by myself."

"Call me AR. I took a gap year before starting college, and this is my last summer before I start my studies at the local community college in Riverside. I'm planning to study Physics, but really, I'm here to practice my Akido." 

The introduction circle continued for the next several minutes. For each current resident in the Smash Mansion, there were one or two interns. The interns were from all walks of life, and each one had their background and aspirations. Most of them were from the United States, but at least ten of them were aliens, 5 of them were anthropomorphic animals, and one wore a mask, apparently because he was invisible. And that was just what was visible on the outside. 

Even though Peach confined each introduction to 30 seconds, the sheer size of the introduction circle caused it to continue beyond most people's attention spans. A quarter of the way into the circle, Wario let out another waft, causing the next two people to spend their turns trying to fan away the stink instead of introducing themselves. Rosalina went to the bathroom when her luma said it wanted to wee, then again when it said it needed to use the potty, causing her to skip her turn too. Waluigi snoozed about a third of the way into the circle, and his neighbors struggled to wake him up when the circle came around to him, causing his introduction to be cut short to, "I'm Waluigi! I would be the best, if it wasn't--" 

When it became Mewtwo's turn, Red readied himself to interpret Mewtwo, but Mewtwo argued with him, saying he could project his thoughts himself without needing Red to translate. They argued for several seconds before Mewtwo's neighbors intervened and Red relented, letting Mewtwo broadcast his thoughts himself. 

Soon after Mewtwo was Lucario. Red stood up like usual, but Lucario told (or rather, mentally projected into him) him he could project his thoughts himself like Mewtwo did. Red quickly sat back down, not interested in another confrontation. 

At the halfway point, the Mii brawler re-remembered that trying to adapt such a small-scale tradition to such a large group was going to be boring, and instead of giving details about himself, he brought it up. Soon after he brought it up, the circle started peeling away. Peach tried her best to keep the circle together until the end, but her cheeriness found its match in the collective boredom of the group. Soon, most of the participants in the circle were back to their usual evening activities, leading Peach to stop the introduction circle early despite her plans. 

The horde of humans, humanoids, aliens, animals, angels, goddesses, and every kind in between streamed out of the Smash mansion and into the several surrounding restaurants. The biggest group followed the Fire Emblem cast to a nondescript seafood restaurant by the beach. It was Chrom's favorite, and while both Robins and Lucina would have preferred to not eat here for the fourth time in a week, they couldn't put together a solid opposition, so to the seafood shack it was. 

Wario, Waluigi, and a handful of other boys went around to the Burger King. Sure enough, Wario had it his way, with a triple whopper, large onion rings, and three chocolate milkshakes, all of which he managed to devour before any of the others could even get to their french fries. Waluigi asked for his whopper with eggplant, and upon being told that Burger King didn't have them, like they told him the last ninty-nine times, he shouted at them, "Oh come on, why you can't accommodate a loyal customer!?" before walking out and returning with a snack wrap from the nearby McDonald's. 

The Kid Icarus cast stayed back at the mansion to drink some wine they brought from Skyworld. Even though they were several hundreds of years old, they had no legally accepted way of demonstrating that they actually were that old, and since they looked young, no one gave them the benefit of the doubt when it came to trying to determine their age. A handful of interns joined them in their drinking. They delivered wine to all comers, and didn't bother to check ages. I would've said this was the biggest group of underage drinkers I've ever seen if I didn't see a video of a frat party when I was looking for colleges to apply to. 

At the supermarket, Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong picked out an assortment of fruit, as they usually did. Right behind them was the Duck Hunt trio, with the duck nibbling on bits of squashed fruit that Donkey Kong didn't bother to pick up, the dog panting near a glass window, eager to get a piece of the meat the butchers were cutting up, and the two animals' owner, trying desperately to minimize the chaos that was already ensuing inside. Samus led some college students to the deli inside, where they shared a deli platter outside. Apparently not wanting to give fodder to certain thoughts, Samus ripped her six-inch sandwich in half before eating it. The man opposite to her, dressed in a hooded sweater and sweat pants, followed suit. 

Link and Zelda followed Kirby, King Dedede, and Captain Falcon to a steak house, but silently fell back and went off into their own direction to have a bit of time alone with each other. King Dedede went ahead and ordered a steak as was usual for him. Kirby, on the other hand, spent a while trying to determine what to eat before finally deciding to split a fish and chips with Captain Falcon, who ate the fish while Kirby inhaled the chips. 

Mario and Luigi loved Italian food and made regular meals of it, but each Sunday, they chose some other ethnic food to eat. This week, they opted for Korean food, as did 5 other interns. At the table, Mario and Luigi each started with some soju, leaving the five interns to start digging into the side dishes. As the interns started finishing up their appetizers, they came in and started eating. Of the main dishes, Luigi's bibimbap came first, which he chose to share with Mario. Then as more main dishes came in, the interns went back to eating, concluding with Mario's order of galbi, which he then split with Luigi. After the main dishes were eaten, most of the interns considered themselves full, but the Mario brothers didn't, and walked to a frozen yogurt shop to conclude their meal with some fruit and frozen yogurt. 

After their meals, the 122 interns that opted for Smash Mansion housing made their way back through the firm white glow that was LED street lighting. Each one of them came to their room, opened it with their keys, and went to sleep. The real Smash internship experience started on Monday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who aren't mindgame gods:
> 
>   * Each of the Smashers (and other smash residents) were invited to Smash shortly after the end of their respective continuities. 
>   * The "Mario bros always eat Italian food" thing is a bit tired, so I shook it up. Before this story, they were gradually introduced to non-italian food by other smashers, and now regularly eat non-italian food. However, they're still distinctly Italian, which you might catch if you look closely enough. 
> 



	2. Monday, June 6

At 8 AM, several phones raised a cacophony, as if on cue. Julia lazily raised a hand, felt around for the phone, and swiped the screen left before going back to an unsatisfying half-sleep state. However, by then, the alarm had woken up Stacy, who got up change out of her sleepwear and into some casual work clothes. Julia then felt Stacy nudge her out of bed. She really wanted to go back to sleep, but because of the sun shining through the window blinds, she wasn't going to be doing that anytime soon. 

Stacy went into the bathroom to brush her teeth and apply her makeup, leaving Julia in the main bedroom to get her clothes on. She took the first shirt, pants, and socks she could identify from her luggage bag, and got them on. When Stacy left the bathroom, Julia quickly made her way to the bathroom, but was stopped by Stacy, who said, "You shirt's on backwards."

Julia kept going to the bathroom, and turned her shirt right-side out there. After brushing her teeth for a minute, she spit out the minty white mixture in her mouth, and looked up at the reflection of the tired-eye, tan-skinned college student. After rubbing some skin cream on her face and applying some concealer, rouge, and blush, she left. She would have liked to have more to her lips and eyes, but from her experience, all lipstick and mascara did to her face was make it evident that she really wasn't a morning person. 

After getting themselves ready, the two joined a much larger crowd to the Dining Hall. Once there, Julia put a bowl onto her tray and poured Cheerios and chocolate milk into it. She and Lucina, taking different paths, sat down at the same table. 

"Lucina."

Lucina raised her head from the table. 

"How have been you been? I wanted to follow Smash through the spring, but finals took up my time."

Lucina swallowed the chunk of sourdough, bacon, and egg, then took a breath and replied, "It's hard living under Math's shadow. People think I fight like Marth, so when the choice is between me and Marth, they go for the 'real deal'. I wish people would stop thinking that way. My hard practice has certainly helped me carve out a foothold in the competitive ground, but it hasn't helped quiet down claims that I'm a clone."

"I hear you. My longtime favorite was Captain Falcon, but you're my second. And I was wondering why I was seeing so little of you in Smash."

Julia took a glance at her phone. The weather forecast said it was going to be slightly cloudy with reasonable wind speeds and virtually no change of rain. 

"What brings you here?" Lucina asked. 

"Well, I have some college credits to obtain…"

"As in here. The Smash grounds."

"Well, that began when I stumbled upon The Pirate Bay at the beginning of High School, and saw recordings of Smash matches. I showed them to my dad, and soon it became a thing for me and my single dad to sit next to each other and watch the fights on the CRT monitor we had. We got a letter in the mail from Smash Corp. telling us that they knew we were pirating. My dad then thought about getting a proxy at this point, but I convinced him to pay the 30 dollar monthly subscription."

"And what are you going to be working on here?"

"My major is physical therapy, and I'm supposed to meet the Wii Fit Trainer by 1:00 PM sharp."

"I'm going to be doing training with her at that time. Maybe I'll see you there."

Julia wasn't exactly interested in meeting Lucina, but she did feel relieved that she managed to establish base with someone from inside the Smash mansion this early on. 

===

At the other side of the Dining Hall, Gaven was the first to finish his waffles, saturated with a 50/50 mixture of strawberry jam and diluted maple syrup. Immediately he excused himself and went four floors to obtain his two-in-one laptop before making his way back to the elevator. As soon as he set his device on the table, he noticed a wave of green and gold pass right by. 

"Lady Palutena? What are you here for?"

His intuition proved correct. Lady Palutena turned around.

"You'll see soon."

At his laptop, he posted a new entry to his personal blog. While he was typing up a blog post, he was suddenly interrupted by a voice inside his head. 

"Testing, one, two, three--"

Gaven's typing flow was interrupted. He shouted, "Yes, whatever system you're using to project your voice is working! Now can you please let me work in peace?"

"No problem."

Gaven lost his train of thought, but kept trying to blog. He couldn't figure out what he was thinking at the time, but managed to put together a new train of thought. And then the office gradually filled up with interns, interfering with that train of thought. Time to stop blogging and time to start paying attention. 

At 10:00 AM, Palutena made her way to the front of the room and did a quick head count to verify that everyone was there.

"Does everyone hear me?"

Everyone nodded their head. 

"Alright, good. I am the wetware administrator in the Smash mansion, and I'll be telling you about the computers here in the Smash Mansion. Take a seat at one of the workstations available." 

Gaven headed to the workstation right next to him. It proudly proclaimed the presence of 16 gigabytes of ECC memory, two Core i7 processors, a 1 TB solid-state drive with hardware encryption, and an HD touchscreen monitor. 

"Now log into your computer. By default, your username should be your first and last name in lowercase, without anything in between, and your password should be given on your internship acceptance letter."

A handful of hands went up to ask for help. Palutena went to each one, and soon each intern was logged in. 

"Our workstations run on Arch Linux, which, by default, provides a textual interface."

Some of the interns had started typing at the terminals, but none of them figured out how to get their system to do anything besides complain that it didn't understand the commands being given to it.

"You might be confounded as to what advantage the textual interface might hold. Rest assured, the power and expressiveness of the shell will show more naturally after I've guided you through it." 

Palutena then directed everyone through a series of exercises. First, they created a file, directed output from the fortune command-line program to it, and directed it to cowsay. Then they did a bunch of directory manipulations, creating copies of the file, putting it everywhere in the home directory, and then deleting it. 

To demonstrate the Unix principles of separation and modularity, she had each person run the xstart command. Each person got a different desktop environment. Gaven got KDE. His neighbor on the left got MATE, while his neighbor to the right got GNOME. After that, Palutena directed to use the desktop enviorment to go to a file and run it. Each person got essentially the same result. Palutena directed everyone to cat the file. Same. 

Then she directed each person to open up a different file that the first file referenced. Everyone had a different script. Gaven had a shell script running on the Debian Almquist shell, as he could tell by the shebang line on the top of his file. He looked to his sides. His left neighbor had a GNU Guile script, while the neighbor on the right had a node script. 

After half an hour of Unix exercises, Gaven was in familiar enough territory that his mind began to drift to the sound upstairs. There were people fighting…

Upstairs, a man was holding a bow. He took an arrow, drew the bow, took aim, and hit a target. Where, Gaven couldn't tell. Link had some critiques for the bowman. 

"Remember to keep your arm extended the whole time. I saw it start to buckle at full draw."

He sighed, then took another arrow. He drew the bow, and shot it again. This time, Link had words of encouragement. 

"Good technique. Now keep it up." 

Next to them, Pit grabbed a bundle of arrows, then shot them in rapid succession, each of which landed in very different places. 

In a nearby room, a swordswoman was hacking away at a sandbag which, despite its name, was filled with gravel to make it easier to clean up. She hit it with the tip of her blade, then closer to its hilt, before taking a broom and sweeping the gravel back up. 

"Do you need any help?"

Gaven looked up at the voice. Palutena was right next to him, acting friendly as always. The workstation he was at had its screen blackened, and when he shook the mouse, the lock screen came up.

"Uhh… no, I don't. I was just lost in thought."

"Understood. I'm always here to help you when you need it."

Gaven started focusing again, though at this point Palutena let everyone out for a lunch break. He walked out with everyone else, still trying to reclaim his thoughts. 

===

This time around, the dining hall was serving up a variety of soups. Because she wasn't going to do business until 1 in the afternoon, Julia was third in line. She took a ladle's worth of tomato soup, poured it into her bowl, and walked by, near the end of the line. When Lucina passed the same spot, she gave a nonverbal signal of recognition, which Lucina reciprocated.

Pac-man didn't take well to soups, so he went to the very back of the line and grabbed a couple of oranges. He joined Mr. Game and Watch, who just changed out of his apron, at a window table. 

"I've met with some interns, and they seem to be interesting kinds of fighters. You want to meet with them later today?"

Mr. Game and Watch beeped out a sequence of descending tones. 

"Oh. I wasn't aware of your workload. Though now that you mention it, it does make sense that you're working harder than you used to."

A couple of flat beeps came from Mr. Game and Watch as he munched on a cracker. 

"Okay, do you know when you'll be off work?"

Mr. Game and Watch responded with two sequences of tones: one rapidly ascending, then one that ascended more slowly. 

===

One would expect that Shulk, Marth, Roy, and the other young men (and young hom) to be mobbed by interns at this point. To everyone's relief, that wasn't what happened. Still, it seemed like every other hour some girl "wandered" to the general area near one of their rooms. The vast majority of their fans were considerate enough to give them the space they needed, but those in the majority weren't the ones that they saw every day to their annoyance. 

===

In the training room, an intern, filling in for the Wii Fit trainer, was leading a roomful in a series of stretches. Julia saw that Lucina was there, as promised, and waved in her general direction. Lucina, and Luigi, who happened to be next to her, waved. Julia then settled down, and began aiding various Smashers in their stretches, as Wii Fit trainer told her to earlier. 

After the stretches and warm-ups, the training started in earnest, with Master Hand's instruction fresh in their minds. Five of the seven swordfighters in the training room grouped together to teach their interns, but disagreements about which particular aspects and techniques to demonstrate soon broke that group down. Marth emphasized good spacing in his combat and training. Meta Knight was experienced with making the opponent come to the fight, rather than bringing the fight to the opponent. Roy didn't like to wait for good opportunities in combat, instead preferring to rush in and rack up damage quickly. And Ike's style was to strike hard when given a chance, rather than striking quickly, like the others did. 

Lucina, unlike the four others, didn't stick to any one style, but adapted her strategy to counter the fighting style of whoever she was against. Or that was in theory. In practice, she tended to play her matches like Marth, taking advantage of differences in attack ranges to maximize risk versus reward. 

===

After the four swordsmen divvied up the intern sword-fighters among themselves, Lucina was left with the two that didn't join the others. One held a thin, pointy sword and a chain-mail glove with metal portrusions. The other gripped a barbed sword with both hands. Exactly how did they fight, Lucina thought. So to the training simulators the three went. 

The first diagnostic match was against the fencer. Lucina expected that the fencer was just another tipper who happened to not like Marth. Her opponent started stepping around, balancing out any approaches or retreats Lucina did. Then he struck with a jab. The sword didn't do much damage, but the attack's lightning speed was enough to demonstrate that her opponent wasn't kidding around. 

Lucina, who entered rage mode as her damage percent picked up, made headway in knocking her opponent around with her sword. While his ground speed was fast and his damage approaches nearly impossible to punish, his combos were limited to grabbing Lucina up close, then down-throwing her to a spot where his sword did the most damage. Lucina baited him into attacking with his gloved fist for a knockout, then shielded the attack and comboed him one more time, ending with a spike into oblivion. Game. 

After some questions, Lucina determined that the swordfighter, named Patrick, was indeed an epee fencer who took up Smash two months ago. Offensive combos were nonexistent in fencing, as hitting the opponent with the tip of the sword halted the action and reset the fencer's positions. His metal glove helped improve his grab and knockout game for Smash, but he was clearly inexperienced with it. 

Lucina then started the diagnostic match against the other swordfighter. At the start, Lucina wondered what kind of weapon the opponent's sword was. That was answered when Lucina's opponent opened up her blade, catching Lucina's sword mid-attack, before it hit. Then she closed her triple blade and directed Lucina to the ground, leaving Lucina open for a down tilt that dealt 10% damage. Yep, her other mentee wasn't kidding around either. 

After Directional Influencing her way out of the combo, Lucina stepped away, waiting for a good opportunity to punish. Sure enough, her opponent walked to her and swung her sword overhead. Lucina prepared a counter, sending her opponent flying back to the end of the platform. Lucina rested a bit, and saw her opponent do it again. Another combo, ending with a smash attack, sent Lucina's opponent flying again, this time into the left border thanks to bad Directional Influence. Game. 

Lucina's judgement of her other mentee, named Suzie, was fair. She had a powerful counter move that could easily be used to start long combos, but she wasn't using it to its fullest potential. If her mindgaming was improved, she could prove to be a menace, baiting opponents into executing bad attacks which she could then counter to lead into her powerful, but laggy, sword slashes. But right now, her moves were rather easy to read. 

Though their fighting styles could be fit with some of the other four sword fighters, Lucina decided that what the heck, they seemed to prefer me. She improvised some drills to familiarize Patrick with the persistent-hitting nature of brawl without letting him lose his fencing experience. Then she sat down, trying to figure out what to teach next. After watching Lucina wander in thought, Suzie finally decided that it would be best for her to practice, letting Lucina watch and constructively criticize her technique. 

===

Later in the afternoon, the interns, finished with their six hours, give or take, came down for dinner. Different people came at different times for dinner, but the largest group came around at 5:00, after they went back to their rooms, took showers, and changed their clothes into something that didn't smell of sweat. Gaven came just a bit earlier thanks to his less physically demanding job, and got early on the chili. When he came down to eat, he found firsthand that the cooks were brutally honest when they said the soup was hot, and Dr. Mario soon had a surprise visit from Gaven. 

After a bit of guidance from Dr. Mario and Google, Gaven, heading back to his seat, got a soda cup, and started filling it with ice. Then, he tipped the cup, delivering the ice into his mouth. A boy, who was just passing by, asked,"Anything happen to you?"

Gaven said, unenthusiastically, "Yes. A boiling hot dinner happened."

Without his appetite vaporized away, Gaven sat at his computer, blogging. He had a day's worth of activities and a painful burn, and all he wanted to do was to lie down in his room and contribute to open-source projects in peace. 

===

At seven, Julia came down for dinner. The chili was no longer scalding hot, but merely hot. To prevent her chili from going into warm territory, she worked quickly, scooping chili into her bowl, then sitting at the nearby table and eating up the chili in mere minutes. A villager stopped by her and watched. When she finished, she noticed him.

"Hello," she said.

The villager merely waved. 

Julia then noticed the mess of chili around her mouth. After wiping it up, she focused back on the villager, who had taken a moment to write a small note with a pencil lying on the ground. She took the note from his hand and read it. 

"Meet at the Smash stadium tomorrow at 11 PM… but for what?"

The villager dashed out of the dining hall before Julia could direct him that question. Julia decided what the heck, my schedule is free at this time, so I may as well go there…

===

Back in a Smash mansion room, Julia took out her iPhone and made contact with friends. In a phone call to a sorority member, Julia off-handedly mentioned the villager's invitation to an event at the Smash stadium at 11 PM. Stacy heard, but since she was trying to catch some sleep before an early-morning event tomorrow, she didn't bother to ask. But it did sound interesting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who lack an all-seeing eye:
> 
>   * Cowsay is a terminal program often used to introduce Unix newbies to the command line. It basically prints an ASCII picture of a cow with a speech bubble whose text is entered through standard input, AKA the keyboard. 
>   * Xstart starts the graphical environment on most unix computers. This is part of some operating systems, but unix systems usually delegate this task to a system known as the x window system, hence the name. KDE and GNOME are different desktop envorments that both make use of x. 
>   * Cat is a unix command that is used to display and concatenate files. 
> 



	3. Tuesday, June 7

At 6:30, Stacy's phone buzzed and clattered against her nightstand. Julia gave Stacy a mean glare from her bed, but didn't have any energy to do anything besides this while Stacy changed into a t-shirt and a medium-short skirt. Stacy then spent a moment putting on eyeliner before running out. Her makeup routine was usually more complete, but she was already almost late to an event. 

Stacy tried to remember the room number she was told. Was it 106… no wait, 160? She forgot. So instead, she went back to her room, and checked her invitation card to see what number the room was. 316 it was. 

Well, now she knew. There was no time to waste, so Stacy ran as fast to the room as she could without making her body feel sore, silently wishing she had the foresight to put on a sports bra. When she arrived, there were ten people, four smashers, and one stranger, all standing up. She tried to name the five non-interns. The three Mii fighters, Mumkhar, and… who was that? 

"Oh, I'm the owner of the Duck Hunt animals. I don't blame you for not recognizing me."

Stacy shook his hand. She also went around to greet everybody else. All the other interns here were interning here to fight. After a few minutes, the Mii brawler stepped onto a reinforced cardboard box and started speaking to the room. 

"We put this event together on short notice after we heard about the internship program two days ago. Thanks for being one of the relatively few to come to our informal event."

The Mii brawler then took some time to explain that the five non-interns were highly supportive of the interns, and wanted the most to see them take a position in the Smash roster. Admittedly, Mumkhar almost certainly wasn't here to be helpful, but to advance his own interests, but that was no matter to the fifteen, who, together, would mark as much change into the Smash system as they could. 

It was a rather light affair, with sugar cookies and lemonade, but they also heard quite a bit about the workplace politics inside the Smash mansion. Master Hand, as powerful as he appeared in the Smash mansion, delegated most of the hard decisions to other people. And as long as those decisions didn't cause problems, he let them stand. 

Of these inner decision-makers, the most respected of them was Sakurai. He controlled entry into the Smash system. He wasn't feared much by the Smashers, as he had no control once they entered the roster, but any new applicants could give their dreams a goodbye kiss if they got on Sakurai's bad side. 

Once the meeting was done, everyone left the room except the three Mii fighters, who continued discussing the situation among themselves. Stacy left directly for the dining hall, where she found the coffeemaker, and served herself a coffee with two creams and two sugars. She felt totally awake, but it was just habit that she drank coffee each weekday morning. 

===

Patrick, who was also at the meeting, opted to go back to his room and sleep some more. On his way back, he dodged a Fox illusioning his way through the hallway, then saw Zelda warping past him. Then he saw his roommate Stefan running right by right as he entered his room. What was going on today? 

At the atrium, Fox faced a television camera. He joined by a motley crowd of smashers and interns, most of them wanting a spot on camera. Fox was all dressed up for the occasion, but hadn't prepared any words, and couldn't come up with them on the fly. Pit was the first to speak directly to the cameras. 

"I'm sure I'll find some new friends from this crowd!"

Dark Pit was about to throw out a snarky response, but Palutena was able to pre-emptively discourage it. The crowd wanted to head towards the camera, but to fit everyone in the frame and capture the scope of the crowd, the cameraman asked everyone to take a few steps back. 

"XRS 33.2444328 9.1347677, say hello to everyone!"

"Hiiiii!"

A reporter asked the first intern she could find that was receptive to questions. "What brings you here?"

The crowd answered back, even though the question directed at just one person. 

"Smash is fucking awesome!"

"Apply the skills I learned from college!"

"I wanted to meet the smashers!"

"Training to fight like real!"

"It's a paid internship!"

The reporter's next question was directed at the crowd that had answered her first question. "What was your first few days like?"

"Awesome!"

"It's now ordinary to me now."

"Don't care much for the work, but who cares with lots of friends!"

"Why can't I stay here longer?"

"The sweat is well worth it!"

"I love them all."

The crowd had crept towards the camera, so the cameraman directed everyone away again. 

The reporter asked a third question. "Smashers, what do you think of the interns so far?"

Sonic came forward. "This what I wasn't expecting when they said they were hiring, but I'm not complaining."

Jigglypuff, positioned in an intern's arms, called out, "Jiggly!"

Link just smiled a bit and nodded his head. 

Ness said, "Okay… Uh… " before being interrupted by the next question. 

King Dedede patted the nearest smasher lightly on her head. She didn't react. 

===

Upstairs, Gaven was seated in an unused meeting room, busy typing away at his two-in-one on an IRC channel with the rest of the OpenSmash team. Soon he would be launching a video blog post, and would be able to explain the situation to everyone.

He set the laptop angle at 100 degrees, and checked all systems to make sure they were working. Then he started the live stream, with about 500 viewers on board. 

"Gaven here again. Well, good news and bad news. Anyone want to guess?"

The chat was full of guesses. Some of them had guessed work or internship given the office background of the place, but there weren't enough clues to guess that Gaven had gotten a Smash internship. 

"Yes, the good news is I got an internship. Can you guess where?"

The chat lit up with a wide range of guesses. Google? Red Hat? Wolfram? Hewlett Packard? Some random startup nobody has heard of? 

"Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. And nope. It's actually Smash Corp."

The chat delivered a mix of reactions.

"Unfortunately, since I can view and copy the Smash proprietary system source code, I'll have to stop contributing to the OpenSmash source code to avoid any legal problems for anyone. Sorry to everyone."

And then the chat exploded. There were the usual insults and condolences surrounding any sort of disaster. 

"Anyway, I'm going to be contacting the legal department so that I can continue on other open-source projects without interruption. Next week I'll decide which new open source project I'll contribute to." 

Gaven, hearing a bit of crackling, turned around. He half expected Phosphora to appear there, but there she wasn't. He kept continuing the livestream, not bothering to check behind him again. 

"And next week, you'll probably see some other part of the Smash mansion behind me." 

===

Lunch that day wasn't an American food like it was yesterday. This time, it was curry. The Smashers, many of them Japanese and most of them familiar with the Smash cuisine, gobbled it up. The interns didn't. One guy just scooped the white rice, with no curry to eat it with. The others took varying quantities of curry sauce, with and without the chunks of meat and vegetables within. 

Palutena was sitting by an enthusiastic eater, offering him another plate of curry. "You might like this curry. It's especially strongly flavored."

Sure enough, the intern gulped it up like he did the last plate. But then…

"HOT HOT HOT HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT!!!"

Palutena was sitting by. "Ah, the wonders of capsaicin."

The intern was now running around like he was on fire. 

"HOW DO I STOP THE BURRRRRNNNNNNNNN!!!!"

Palutena picked up her staff. "Hold still while I apply this to you."

He tried his best to stay still, but was still clearly suffering from the chili burn. Palutena pointed her staff at his mouth. 

"Power of emulsification!"

I had no idea what that meant, and neither did the interns I interviewed. Anyway, soon the intern's pain started dying down. He stopped moving around, and soon was sitting back down at the table. 

A bystander came to the table and asked, "Lady Palutena, do you have more?"

"Sorry, no. That was my last plate of superspicy curry. It's banned around here."

"Really?"

"Not really, it's actually available at the local 7-11. It's just that nobody is eating it because are some matches happening this afternoon, and while superspicy curry wasn't screened for, Smash matches devolved into contests of who could breathe more fire on the opponent. Master Hand takes competitive fairness seriously."

The intern then stood up, his mouth still feeling warm and his stomach feeling full, and walked out of the dining hall. 

===

That afternoon, it was the first singles match of June: A 1v1 of Dark Pit versus Ganondorf. Today was just the first few matches of a double-elimination tournament, but fans of the Dark Lord of disrespect were ready to see him kick some rogue angel ass. 

The interns didn't get free admission to matches, but enough of them were fans of Ganondorf that forty of them decided to buy the fifty-dollar tickets, and William was one of those forty interns. On the other hand, Dark Pit's smaller fanbase didn't care much. 

At the stadium, Ganondorf met with his usual crowd of fans. Dark Pit, meanwhile, had a much smaller crowd. Viridi, Phosphora, and Pit were there to reassure him, but not too many others. Master Hand directed everyone to the stadium seats before the match started, and directed Dark Pit and Ganondorf to the center. 

Dark Pit struck Battlefield from the list of starter stages, then Ganondorf struck Final Destination. Dark Pit then struck Smashville, and Ganondorf struck Town and City. So Lylat Cruise it was for the first match. A ship rose up from the stadium floor, and Dark Pit and Ganondorf took opposite positions on the larger platform. "Three. Two. One. GOOO!!!"

Ganondorf leaped onto the right platform, preparing an approach that Dark Pit would have trouble refuting. Dark Pit then started short hopping in place, firing arrows and trying to keep Ganondorf back no matter which way he came. Ganondorf charged in anyways, with a bit of jumping to dodge the arrows, and feinted Dark Pit into running in with an electroshock arm before shielding and landing a kick. This sent Dark Pit off the stage. 

Dark Pit then flew up, watching to see if Ganondorf would try to disrespect him as he often did others. He didn't, since Dark Pit had too good of a recovery for him to do much about it. So Ganondorf stood by the stage, waiting for a hint as to where Dark Pit would try to land. Dark Pit then activated his power of flight towards the area above Ganondorf's head, so Ganondorf jumped and kicked in the general area above him. Nope. He jumped too high, but Dark Pit couldn't punish the bad read in time. He opted to create some more space between him and Ganondorf before sending out a volley of arrows. 

Ganondorf hopped in, reading a roll and grabbing Dark Pit. He then threw him down and chained three flame chokes, sending Dark Pit into maximum rage. He then followed with a warlock punch, but Dark Pit read it, and promptly jumped away to avoid it. Dark Pit, seeing Ganondorf in endlag, swiped at Ganondorf with his blade. 

Ganondorf, now at 90% damage, stepped back, waiting for Dark Pit to make another move. Dark Pit walked forward, then suddenly charged with an attack, sending Ganondorf towards the right side before going off to spike him and prevent him from recovering. 

On a respawn platform, Ganondorf took another look at Dark Pit. Dark Pit was starting to aim arrows at him already, and unless he got some more good reads down, he would be in critical danger of being sent into the border again. On the right platform, Ganondorf made his way down, then took a chance and did a back air. Dark Pit wasn't there.

A whole section of Ganondorf fans cheered loudly at this read. William shouted in an uncharacteristically high voice, "Yeah Ganondorf! Show him what darkness is!"

Ganondorf, fast taking up damage from arrows, then charged at Dark Pit, readying an attack behind him. Dark Pit, stepping back, didn't realize what Ganondorf was doing until too late, when Ganondorf had unleashed a kick and sent Dark Pit off the right side. Ganondorf took a position on the left platform, and started hopping. 

Dark Pit disembarked the revival platform quickly and slashed Ganondorf with his blades again, trying to soften up Ganondorf a bit more. Ganondorf, at the edge, then jumped off the platform, leading Dark Pit to follow him off. After that, Ganondorf reached towards Dark Pit with a flame choke and plummeted into the abyss with Dark Pit in his hand. KO. 

The crowd cheered loudly as Ganondorf stood back up from his successful Ganoncide, and Ganondorf gave his trademark evil laugh while the announcer was announcing his win. 

Dark Pit, still a bit bitter from being read accurately, chose his counterpick stage, Town and City. Ganondorf had already banned Delfino Plaza and Halberd, forcing Dark Pit to choose between less pleasant alternatives. 

===

At that point, an intern that happened to also be named Pit went to the bathroom. As much as he wanted to watch Ganondorf pwn Dark Pit again, he had some diarrhea, and really needed to dispose of the pressurized liquid building up in his large intenstine. So off he went, in a convoluted path to a bathroom an eighth of the way around the stadium. 

There, he noticed that the walls of the bathroom stall had writing over them. It was an assortment of common men's opinions, writings, and ideas, some of them good, but most of them worth no more than the brown liquid intern Pit was dispensing into the toilet. The Expand Dong jokes were already worn thin in Pit's mind by this time, but his inner 8-year-old completely lost control upon seeing one particular gem: A mediocre drawing of Viridi was on the wall, holding a phone up to her ear. 

After a while, he checked his phone. It was already 6 PM. He spent more than an hour sitting on the toilet, emptying himself and reading all the things that other anonymous people wrote. Hurriedly, he then wiped his bottom until he couldn't see or smell a yellow streak on the toilet paper anymore, flushed the toilet, washed his hands, and joined everyone back at the stadium. 

===

At that point, Ganondorf had survived 2 matchups, but lost one match and was on his last stock still trying to send a heavily damaged Meta Knight off the Omega form battlefield. Meta Knight walked up, baiting Ganondorf into throwing an attack. Ganondorf guessed that Meta Knight would probably Dimensional Cape to his other side and try to attack from there, as he did several times before, or maybe charge in suddenly and do his dash attack. Nope. Meta Knight was reaping the profits of conditioning, and grabbed Ganondorf as he shielded. 

Ganondorf, trying to play the same mindgames, finally managed to land a grab on Meta Knight after a minute and promptly threw him into the edge, but by then had accumulated 60% damage from punished bad reads. Meta Knight then started flying around near the end of the stage. Ganondorf, having seen this trick before, assumed that Meta Knight was trying to bait him into attempting Ganoncide. Not this time. This time, Meta Knight was trying to induce just that reaction, and dove in for even more damage with an aerial combo. 

At the end, it was Meta Knight that managed to secure the match, and Ganondorf was left clapping while Meta Knight slashed the air with his Galaxia. A moderate roar could be heard from the stadium, but it was more of a mixed reaction than the cheers that intern Pit heard after Ganondorf's victory over Dark Pit. 

At dinner, Dark Pit was still brooding over his loss to Ganondorf. It was a tradition inside the Smash Mansion to give containers of low-sodium condiments to smashers that were bitter about losses. Sometimes, it was further humiliation, sometimes it was encouragement, and sometimes it was just a gentle reminder to get over a loss. And sure enough, Palutena had a container of low-sodium Worcestershire sauce to give to Dark Pit. 

"No. Please. I'm really not interested in what you have to say. Take that fish sauce back," Dark Pit grumbled. 

"Pittoo, there's still a loser's bracket that you can make your way through. Your next matchup is against Mega Man, and if you can keep your game together, the matchup will be in your favor."

"Not right now. Let me focus on eating right now."

Pit then spoke. "No problem. Even as a rival, I'll be more than happy to train with you anytime you feel like."

Dark Pit didn't respond, instead emptying the last of the Worcestershire sauce onto the stir-fry that he was eating at his own table. 

===

At 10, Julia and Stacy both took paths to the stadium. Julia assumed Stacy was looking for a late-night snack, but Stacy was going for the stadium. She took a different path than Julia did to the stadium. When they were there, they identified each other from opposite sides of the now nearly empty stadium.

"Stacy?!"

"Julia!!"

After the initial surprise, they made their way down to the stadium, where there were about twenty interns and exactly five villagers. The familiar red-shirted villager that handed Julia her invitation handed a packet of written papers to one of the interns. After reading it for a bit, he started speaking. 

"Alright, so… um… this is a game of Mafia, a game of deduction, strategy, and… people watching each their own backs to make sure they aren't betrayed. So anyway. If you haven't played mafia before, here's how to play. Each person gets put into a faction: The townspeople, who don't know about who anyone is besides themselves, and the mafia, who know who all the mafia are. The townspeople want to get rid of the mafia, the mafia want to outnumber the townspeople.

Each day, everyone gets together and decides by democratic vote who they want to kill. This is the primary way for the townspeople to chip away at the mafia, but be careful about it, since it works equally well against townspeople and mafia, and the mafia can participate in the vote. And each night, the mafia meet together in secret-- okay, they exchange messages on an intranet server-- and they decide by their own democratic vote which of the townspeople to kill. This is the primary way for the mafia to get rid of townspeople.

A handful of others are special. Some have various immunities or resistances or know more. Some have special powers they can activate during the night. And two people have their unique win condition that they can satisfy instead of winning with the town or the mafia. It's going to be up to you to figure out what those are and who has them.

Anyway, without further ado, you can go back to your rooms. Next morning, you'll receive a card detailing your role, your alignment, and your win condition."

Julia and Stacy walked back to their room quickly. Julia wanted to discuss, but Stacy was already snoozing, making up for the sleep she lost waking up that morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who don't have a goddess telling you things:
> 
>   * Emulsification is the process of dissolving two liquids that would otherwise not dissolve in each other. Capsaicin, the primary source of spiciness in chili peppers, is usually found dissolved in oil, and dissolves poorly in water. 
> 



	4. Wednesday, June 8

It was eight thirty, and Gaven's Nexus phone rang on the phone. He opted to take up residence in off-mansion housing for this internship, since being in a mansion with two hundred others didn't exactly sound like fun to him. But he still opted for the meal options at the Smash Mansion dining hall, so he would have to get his clothes on reasonably quickly. And he did, with a pair of cargo shorts and a plain grey t-shirt. 

In the bathroom, Gaven looked at his teeth, which still were cream-colored despite his best attempts at brushing them clean and white. Then he checked his mirror. A quick run-over with an electric razor made his chin nice and smooth, but didn't quite cut all the stubble above his lip. He usually left his hair as the bed pillow arranged it, but since he had the time, he gave his hair a quick comb-down. 

He jabbed at his phone with a cheap stylus that he picked up at a hackathon his sophomore year in college. Nope, no tinder or bumble love interests. No, nothing interesting in his personal email. No, nothing particularly interesting in his Facebook feed. If anyone, he was the interesting person in his Facebook feed, having posted a group selfie that Palutena had taken with the rest of the computer scientists and engineers on Monday. 

Gaven's apartment was positioned across the street from the Smash mansion, and right next to the local bar. He thought he had a good steal when he saw it being open for rent for 7000 gold a month, cheaper than what Master Hand was offering in the mansion, but the first night he slept in it, he realized why it was so cheap. Oh well, there wasn't much he could do about the three-month contract and the security deposit he had already signed over. 

There were a variety of hot breakfast foods available, many of which weren't always available. Gaven picked up some hash browns, scrambled egg whites, and a few pieces of bacon, and made his way to the least crowded table. Dark Pit also happened to be at the table, making contact with some goddess, probably Viridi, from what Gaven could tell. Gaven might have talked to him, but the words didn't come to mind as he wanted them to, so he said nothing. 

Well, perfect opportunity to blog again. This time, it was a follow-up to that vlog where he announced he had to break off from the OpenSmash project. He was considering a wide variety of projects, but couldn't decide which ones to eliminate. Maybe his followers could help him narrow down the choices. 

===

Since Stacy wasn't one of the twenty-one to be invited to the Mafia game, there was only one role card that the two found in the mail slot that morning. It was for a vanilla townsperson, and Julia would be the one representing that particular townsperson. Stacy offered to be by her side, but Julia decided that her antics would probably spoil the game for her faster. She could help her make decisions behind the scenes, though. 

===

As the clock approached 10, most of the smashers and many of the interns got back into training. AR joined up with Ryu, who, at AR's request for him to give some instruction, gave him basic, offensive martial arts training. AR found this basic training a bit of a letdown, but Ryu was quick to reassure him that such basics would quickly turn out to be useful. For one, he had to have some way of attacking opponents that, knowing his strengths, would refuse to go into hand-to-hand combat with him. Also, such basic training would help him reinforce the basic groundwork that his Akido was built upon. 

===

Stefan had taught himself how to speed-shoot arrows since he started high school, but under Link's instruction, he had found out just how quickly his skills broke down under pressure. Sure, he could seed a target full of arrows in just two seconds given time to prepare, but under combat, he wouldn't have the convenience of standing for even five seconds to prepare before rapid-firing arrows. Pit, having some experience in shooting arrows ridiculously quickly from bows in combat situations, took over from Link and started retraining Stefan's basics. 

===

At a rock climbling wall, Lilly, who took her style from Mixed Marial Arts, was doing pull-ups alongside Little Mac. Doc Louis's rigorous training regimen kept Little Mac up in a field full of swordfighters, mages, and psychics. When Lilly came up to them, Doc Louis, seeing that Lilly was in a similar position as Little Mac years ago, started her on the same training regimen, and put her alongside Little Mac to encourage the two to encourage each other. 

===

After passing by the gym, Gaven went into a different office. Shulk ran right behind him, almost sending Gaven off his feet. “Woah! Watch it!” he shouted.

Shulk didn't respond back, too intent on averting a bad future. He had a vision that one of his fangirls would be taken for a wild ride by his Monado, sending her flying all around the room and causing extensive damage to his room and all the projects he had inside it. He put thousands of hours into those projects. If that future was fulfilled, those hours would be gone, and considerable effort would be required to recover those hours. 

===

Gaven sat at a workstation. This was his real first day on the job. And apparently, one of the workers was typing out some sort of high respect to a goddess, and using a shell command to send it. 

"I see you're one of the many interns around here. You see, it's become a custom around the Smash engineers, programmers, and software developers to use the workstation as a sort of shrine for religious purposes. It was an in-joke at first, but then lost the jocular aspect and simply became something we do."

Gaven was never indoctrinated in any sort of religion by his parents, and because of his childhood, the question of religion never really came up. His atheism started becoming solidified as he went into middle school, and by high school, he found theological arguments with the occasional doorstep missionary rather amusing, if trollish. In this universe, the powers of the deities here were demonstrated convincingly enough all around him, so at least here, he believed in gods. 

Gaven never really got the hang of religion. Why did they spend long hours acknowledging the power of a being whose power was already self-evident? Why did the gods and goddesses in question care? And what did he have to gain by giving them offerings that they shouldn't have given out freely anyways? They still were bound strongly in his head from his atheist days, and he would need some strong convincing to be converted into any religion in particular. 

Still, he held reasonably high respect for Lady Palutena, and started typing out some words for her. When it came to deliver the message, he decided to try the shell command out for a spin. Fittingly enough, it was called pray. First, he pulled up the man page, which described what pray did. 

Then he tried to send his file to Palutena. It didn't work, however, since he misspelled the goddess's name as "Paletuna". Thankfully, he wasn't the first one to misspell the name, since the program was designed well enough to suggest that he really meant Palutena and offer to send it to her. Gaven tapped the Y key to confirm the interactive prompt. 

Out of curiosity, Gaven the pulled up a list of deities according to the pray command. As Gaven expected, Palutena was at the top of the list, receiving 15% of the prayers sent through the pray command. Next was Alvis, getting the next 10%. As Gaven scanned down the list, he found some rather strange entries. Master Hand was apparently godly enough to receive his own entry, and deities that he was unaware of filled up the list. Dyntos, Arceus, Naga… Gaven decided to get his head out of this pray program and start work. 

For his first task, he was to write a unit test for a particular section of code that a pair of more experienced programmers were writing. It was code monkey stuff, but he had to start somewhere. Soon he had a draft in hand, and by the end of two hours, he had run through all the possible cases he could think of, and figured he was done, as far as he could tell. Whether the programmer pair he was writing it for had the same opinion wasn't within his conscious control. 

===

Shulk, arriving at his room, noticed the Monado lying around. Remembering the vision, he promptly took it and placed it in a tall locker that he used to hold his tools. Just then, a girl that looked just like the one in his vision passed by. She introduced herself as Stacy. 

"I'm Shulk. Stacy, I thought the interns were supposed to be working at this time?" 

Stacy's mouth closed and turned down slightly before she ran off to her work, grating large amounts of cheese for the cooks to prepare lunch with. 

===

Gaven received feedback on his work. It worked like a charm for simple cases, but a slight misunderstanding of the specification of the function led it to be too permissive for some cases, which one of the programmers demonstrated by plugging a clearly absurd potential output into the unit test. With a bit of help from one of the resident programmers, Gaven rewrote his unit test to be correct, and checked to make sure he didn't accidentally introduce any new bugs to the unit test. His first project on the job: done. 

===

At a simulation chamber, two interns were facing off, their mentors observing from the outside. At one end of the single flat platform was Ellen, equipped with a hunting rifle and learning from Falco. At the other was Jacob, holding two daggers enchanted with auto-return, supervised by Zelda. When the match started, Jacob immediately threw his daggers. Ellen quickly threw out her reflector, sending the daggers back and earning Jacob some firm words from Zelda. 

Ellen then quickly moved forward to retrieve her reflector, while Jacob walked forward, watching out for Ellen's longer-ranged rifle butt. As Jacob walked in with his shield up, Ellen decided to not go with her default approach of jabbing with the rifle barrel, instead grabbing Jacob. With Jacob in hand, she threw Jacob down and thrusted her rifle down into him. Falco, having seen Ellen use her jab approach way too much, praised Ellen's choice of neutral move. 

Jacob, at 30% damage and still being combo'd, directed his body weight upwards, depriving Ellen another chance to hit him. Back at neutral, he read an Ellen approach, rolling in at just the right moment to enter the right distance, and stabbed Ellen twice. Once that happened, he rolled back. Zelda suggested that Jacob be more aggressive and toss his opponent around with his attacks, but by the time she could finish speaking, the game was already back to neutral. 

Ellen loaded her rifle, and pointed it directly at Jacob. Jacob, avoiding any commitment at that moment, saw the barrel pointed at him, jumped, and threw both daggers. Ellen took significant damage and was sent off the edge. She caught a hook she modded onto the rifle onto the ledge, and pulled herself back to the ledge, careful to avoid Jacob's dagger swipes. Falco had warned Ellen not to shoot her rifle against fast opponents or projectile-wielders unless she knew what they were going to do, and there it was. Ellen committed too hard to trying to KO Jacob early in the match, and she was punished for it. 

Jacob, seeing Ellen at the ideal position, swiped downwards with his daggers. This sent Ellen slightly back, giving Jacob another chance to swipe with his daggers. And again. Jacob ran out of midair jumps at that point, and, with Ellen above him, couldn't do much. Or he could, but he wasn't going to risk getting punished for such a basic and predictable follow-up. Zelda was silent, but inside, she was proud that he was learning to be the Sheik she usually channeled in serious matches. 

===

Falco watched as Ellen soft read Jacob's approach and swiped her rifle at him, knocking him back and forcing a neutral situation again. Seeing nothing for him to comment on, Falco started reflecting back on the first day. When the two matched up, Falco saw a reflection of his own combat style in Ellen. She had a slow but powerful rifle, lackluster recovery, and a powerful close-up moveset and grab game. 

But as the two trained, their differences became apparent. Ellen's rifle took a virtual eternity to reload, making it nearly useless unless she could get a hard read, unlike Falco's blaster which was useful for interrupting approaches and recoveries and continuing combos. Her standard attack set of rifle jabs and swings had very uninteresting knockback, leading to reliable combos, but not much edgeguarding or spiking utility. And her vertical mobility, unlike Falco's, was on par with her middling horizontal mobility. 

Still, Falco was determined to make Ellen as good a fighter as he could make her, even if she would end up a very different fighter than him. Falco's feathery exterior wasn't going to let slip that if he had to choose his mentee again, he probably wouldn't choose Ellen. 

===

Back at the match, Jacob managed to lock Ellen into a grab, but had trouble connecting his follow-ups with Ellen at 110% and shifting her weight around in the air to avoid damage. A whiffed dagger strike on Jacob's part was quickly met with a rifle butt, sending Jacob off the stage. To recover, he tossed one dagger back onto the stage, then used an auto-homing to return him to the dagger, and back to the stage. Or rather, he tried. Ellen saw the returning dagger, and quickly used her reflector to send it back, dooming Jacob to fall into the void. Game. 

===

Lunch was as routine as it got in the Smash mansion for most of them, but not for the Smashers that would be next in the brackets. Bowser Jr. was running to the stadium with pasta sauce all over his face, his father chasing after him trying to get him to clean himself up and be a better guest to Mario, Luigi, and Peach. A villager didn't bother sit and eat at all, instead pocketing three tacos to eat during the tournament. 

There weren't too many people in the stadium, but it was filled up all the same. By Hades, taking up half the stadium seats and munching on souls like popcorn.

"Pit!"

"Hades?! Where did you come from?"

"Oh, me? I was written in! It's nice to have such considerate fanfiction authors."

Pit was about to tell him to be more considerate and not hog half the stadium, but stopped when he realized that Hades was probably reveling in his disrespect of others. 

At the center was the pink-haired villager, on Town and City against Roy Koopa, with both of them at one stock. Though Roy had an HP lead of 70% to Villager's 110%, a Villager grab and back throw caught him off guard, and off the edge. Roy Koopa tried to abandon ship to recover, but the Villager knew the Koopalings well, and quickly released a bowling ball to edgeguard Roy. 

===

After another match, the green-dress villager Villager moved up the bracket. Her next match was against Mewtwo. A brown-haired villager unpocketed one of his tacos, and munched on it. At the other side, Mewtwo was concentrating, trying to glean the thoughts in the villager's head. Mewtwo had consistently beaten most of the villagers before, but this one, with her daring reads and sharp mindgaming, gave him the most trouble. If only he could read minds. 

At the end of that match, Mewtwo was tired out from exerting his all to defeat the villager, and almost passed out executing his victory pose, only retaining consciousness because he tumbled down onto the floor instead of completing it. Lucario, who would be standing where Mewtwo was for the next match, rolled the heavy Pokemon away. 

===

Hades left right before the day's matches ended, and successfully hogged the exit by just standing at the door. Crazy Hand, tired of antics such as these that made it harder for Smash Corp to run as a smooth business, told Hades to get out of the way or be forcibly dragged out of the way and prosecuted to the maximum extent allowed by the law. Hades did eventually comply, but not before he gave a few snide remarks to various crowdspeople and drew another threat from Crazy Hand. 

===

At dinner, Mewtwo was still fatigued from the fight from hours ago, leaning on his intern for physical support. The two picked up a handful of tacos, one of which Mewtwo ate on the spot with a bit of intern help. 

===

Five villagers were at a table, surrounded by a bunch of interns. It was the first day of the Mafia game, and they were debating among themselves who should be "lynched" first. Everyone had their roles hidden and were highly distrustful of everyone else at the table. One wrong alliance, and a townsperson could easily be unwittingly fighting for the mafia team. 

"Who's our first scapegoat going to be?" Julia asked. Without any substantive information about who had what role, Julia figured that they would be trying to probe each other's gut feelings and reactions for clues. And though she spent her high school years navigating social hierarchies and became experienced at them, she still couldn't reliably tell people she could trust from people she couldn't just by gut feelings and reactions. 

Two blond men sitting right across from her stood up and pointed their words right at her, trying to make the case that she was probably in the mafia. Thankfully, their case was presented poorly, so Julia let it peter out and return back to neutral. Julia might have considered jumping onto the next accusation bandwagon, but if a townsperson would be lynched first, she really didn't want that blood on her hands for her own sake. 

The villagers kept listening, maintaining the rules and silently discussing among themselves about the day. As tempers flared up and accusations continued flying, the red-shirt villager collected the first vote. There was a plurality that wanted Jerry lynched, but it wasn't the required majority of 11, so back to the flamewars it was. 

Another vote was counted soon afterwards, and soon a majority agreed that Jerry should be lynched in-game. A villager escorted him out of the dining hall, while a different one wrote down his role. He was a vanilla townsperson. The inevitable I-told-you-so's and look-what-you-dids inevitably flared up as the crowd of mafia players slowly dispersed. 

===

Jerry went back to his room, joined by a not-yet-introduced roommate. He was hoping that jumping onto the first suspicious statement and trying to induce a lynch might have been a good idea, but the quick torrent of lynch votes that were piled on him made that trick backfire.


	5. Thursday, June 9

Thursday it was, and AR emerged from bed that morning at eight. He didn't need an alarm, since it was routine for him to sleep at eleven at night a wake up before eight each and every day, and not compromise his sleep schedule at all costs. His roommate was still under the covers even though the sun was shining through the room's blinds. 

On his phone, AR opened up an app and watched the latest matches between the Smashers. His personal favorite smasher, Mewtwo, made it through two matchups, but even with Master Hand making his third matchup the second to last of the day, he was in no shape to compete against “Our Boy” Roy, whose rushdown met rather predictable and lazily timed reactions. A few taps on the screen pulled up Roy's earlier matchups. 

The first match he watched was Roy vs the "Plankager". The purple-shirted villager always picked Timer Counter and Explosive Balloon trip and camped hardcore, a strategy that worked wonders at frustrating the uninitiated. Thankfully, it wasn't effective against opponents with some familiarity with it, but Plankager had a sizeable hatedom all the same. 

Just as expected, Plankager planted a timber counter seed, then began jumping off the ledge and floating back up with explosive balloons. Roy, recalling what countless other smashers did against Plankager, ducked down in the middle of the stage, waiting for the sapling to wither away, then immediately ran in, all guns-- err, sword-- blazing. A quick combo sent Villager up to 40% damage and flying too close to the left border for comfort. 

AR, anticipating another ten minutes of camping and rushing, swiped right. Now Roy was facing off against King Dedede. After dodging one gordo and deflecting another one, Roy ran right in, and instead of just slashing forward with his sword, did a short hop and called the King out for hitting at midrange too predictably with a quick back aerial. After getting tossed around by Roy, King Dedede managed to land near Roy and started his own combo string. 

While deep in watching Smash matches, a door slammed behind AR. His roommate wasn't sneaky, but he was quiet enough that AR didn't hear him putting on clothes, brushing teeth, shaving, and do other typical morning activities through his headphones. This prompted AR to start his morning preparations himself. He already had the shirt and shorts he wanted on, so he went directly to using some mouthwash and brushing his teeth. 

The Smash mansion was serving up hot oatmeal this breakfast. AR took the first opportunity to get to Mewtwo and express his congratulations and condolences, ignoring the smell of warm grains and fruits piping through the area leading up to the dining hall. Mewtwo gave him a glance from the side and projected some thoughts into his mind in response:

"Yes, thank you for being the fifth person to tell me those things. I'm still sore from yesterday, so I'm not interested in doing anything for today besides resting."

===

Sore wasn't the right word to describe what Mewtwo felt. It was a rather different feeling, more akin to depletion with a side of worthlessness, but Mewtwo couldn't think of the right word to describe it, so he just went with the word sore. 

===

Chrom, who shared his mansion room with his children Lucina (usually referred to as Lucy to distinguish her from the grown princess) and Morgan as well as his wife Robin, joined the kids in helping Robin to prepare for her matches. Morgan grabbed a fresh Elwind tome for Robin, while Lucy was fiddling with Chrom's Samsung Galaxy Note, ignoring his requests for Lucy to return it. After a few parent-child hugs, Chrom accompanied the children to the bleachers while Robin dashed at her usual slow pace to a different area in the stadium. 

Numerous interns were wishing the smashers luck in the third floor lounge. Ike carried a projector into the room and positioned it on a table, then left, coming back with a large projection screen. After setting up everything, he plugged a Roku box into the projector with an HDMI cable and, after a bit of fiddling, managed to set it to a channel that usually broadcasted Smash matches. 

"This is for my friends here so they can watch me fight, and possibly see me win. Wish me luck; it'll come in handy when I get out there."

Ike then shook some hands, flicked all but two light switches off, and left for his matches while the crowd settled down and watched the clock approach 10 AM, second by second. The interns that hadn't already resolved their conversations with the smashers finished up in anticipation of the matches. 

===

At ten, Smash started, but first, some Smash analysts came up and delivered their analysis on the subject. 

"Ah yes. Mirror matches, my favorite kind of matches. For those of you that don't share my opinion, let me tell you. Moveset is only half the battle. The more important half is how you use what you have. And in mirror matches, what you see is the fighting styles of different smashers in deep contrast with each other."

"...and why do you bring this up now? Nobody's facing off against clones of themselves."

"I got a bit carried away. If Robin (M) wins his first match, he'll be up against Robin (F) for the second. And there's Iggy Koopa, Ludwig von Koopa, and Bowser Jr. sharing the same fourth bracket. With luck,--"

"Which you probably won't have, given that Robin's first match is against Fox and Iggy is going to be against Sheik for his first match."

"One can always dream, Harold."

"That's not our job here. Our job is to provide objective analysis, understand? Anyway, while my friend here is finishing up his residence contract in Fantasyland, I'll say that I find it likely that Sheik is going to dominate this part of the tournament. As a top tier fighter, she'll have little trouble making her way up. She'll have some trouble against Mario, Fox, or Captain Falcon, whoever makes it to the second bracket, but that's about all I forsee her losing against."

"This isn't Brawl, and Sheik isn't Meta Knight during his years-long reign of terror. While all her matchups here are favorable, it's more than likely that along her matches, someone will best her, matchup edges be damned." 

"Right. RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGHT."

===

An intern stood up from the middle of the sitting interns, and made his way to the 7-11, where he bought a bag of microwave popcorn. He came back after a few minutes, when the first match-- Ike vs. Marth-- came up. The two swordsmen cordially shook hands before taking their positions on a single solid platform, with three moving platforms floating above their heads. 

The fight between the swordmasters was highly tense all the way through. Ike started by walking up to the right place, then rolling up close and personal into Marth's general sourspot before grabbing. Ike managed to deal heavy damage with a couple combos, but some cleverly timed tippers by Marth quickly cancelled out Ike's advantage. Both swordsmen pressed their advantage successfully, with Marth maintaining the spacing and Ike hitting hard whenever safe and throwing out occasional mixups to keep Marth from reading him. After several exchanges of sword slashes, a highly raged Ike managed to land an up tilt on Marth and sent him up, up, and away, taking his last stock. 

On the second match, Marth switched out Shield Breaker and Dashing Assault and chose Final Destination for his counterpick. Ike was able to maintain the upper hand all the way through the battle, but near the end of the match, Ike, expecting Marth to throw out another dancing blade, suddenly saw Marth hitting a forward smash into his forehead, sending him out into nowhere and winning that match for Marth. 

For the third match, Ike counterpicked Battlefield and chose some different specials to throw off Marth's reading and force himself to play slightly differently, even though he wasn't the best at utilizing Smash Counter and Close Combat to the fullest of their potential. This gambit didn't quite work, with Marth leading the charges of percents. With Ike at 120% and Marth at 80%, Ike decided to stop trying to close the percent gap and start trying to get a kill, which was rewarded when Ike landed another tilt on Marth, which, with his rage, sent Marth flying upwards. 

Ike managed to accumulate 22% extra damage on Marth before Marth landed a sourspotted hit that he then comboed into a tipper, KOing Ike. With both swordsmen down to one stock, Marth and Ike continued to press their advantages, trying to get the elusive upper hand as the duel approached its conclusion. After more sword exchanges, Ike saw another opportunity to forward air. He tried to cancel the move as Marth prepared a counter, but it was too late. Or so Ike thought. The move actually whiffed, giving Ike another chance to try to land a strike onto Marth. A forward slash, and Ike won. 

On the stage, Ike faced the cameras, and stated, "I fight for my friends." 

It was just an ordinary victory pose, but Ike's gesture to the interns before he left for his match gave it a special significance to those watching. 

===

On the fifth floor, Arwin was sitting next to ROB, double checking to make sure that ROB's sensors were still correctly calibrated. With a superior watching, he ran a cable from ROB to the workstation and initiated a range-of-motion calibration procedure. Arwin stood back, and soon, ROB was moving into various positions like it was practicing yoga. A loud cheer from two floors down interrupted the task. He lamented that his relatively odd hours left him out of activities such as the one occurring below his feet. This motivated to move briskly through the activity, being highly productive while still following his supervisor well to get the rest of the task done. 

Once done with calibrating each of ROB's sensors, Arwin immediately jumped right over the intervening flights of stairs in two bounds, almost sending him off balance, to reach the source of the cheering. He checked the brackets up on the large screen by the lounge:
    
    
    ---
    - winner: TBD
        - winner: TBD
            - winner:Iggy Koopa
                - winner: Iggy Koopa
                    - name: Iggy Koopa
                    - name: Pit
                - name: Pikachu
            - winner: Robin (F)
                - name: Robin (F)
                - winner: Robin (M)
                    - name: Robin (M)
                    - name: Fox
        - winner: TBD
            - winner: Mario
                - winner: Captain Falcon
                    - name: Captain Falcon
                    - name: Bowser Jr. 
                - name: Mario
            - winner: TBD
                - winner: Ike
                    - name: Ike
                    - name: Marth
                - winner: Sheik
                    - name: Sheik
                    - name: Ludwig von Koopa
    ...
    

Unsurprisingly for a few people that understand me even when I'm not explaining myself, multiple smashers were watching Ike up against Sheik. Arwin joined at the edge, grabbing a handful of popcorn from a nearby bowl and emptying it. 

===

In the match, Ike had a hard time getting hits off of Sheik, who would string together long sequences of moves at times Ike would get close. Good yomi allowed Ike to avoid getting knocked out by confirms into Bouncing Fish up to 160%, allowing him to attrition her up to 90%, but at the three minute mark, Sheik managed to throw out a Bouncing Fish from neutral into a KO, sending Ike back to square zero, with one less stock and without rage. 

Ike managed to even the stocks after a minute, but Sheik made such a task as difficult as possible, forcing him to eat eighteen different needles and sticking combo strings together ruthlessly. When Ike finally knocked Sheik with an f-tilt, he was at 100%, and Ike was unfortunately positioned to get hit by a handful of aerials capped off by a bouncing fish, ending his other stock. 

===

Alec was in an empty room, messing around with PSI teleport. After running around in circles, Alec them teleported slightly forward, telefragging an Alec-shaped hole into a cardboard box. Alec then stopped briefly to PSI ask Ness what was going on later. 

===

Ness didn't bother to answer. Alec, though a big fan of his, was rather annoying. He did take a clue when Ness directed him to develop a slightly different style (by example, no less), but Ness needed that well-deserved break from mentoring. 

Lucas had managed to gather three interns for some games of Spoons, and was seeking Ness out. Ness ran out of the room, followed by an Alec trying to ask what Ness was going for. Alec found his answer when Ness arrived at the game in the back of a hallway upstairs and upon seeing Alec, sighed and scooted slightly to make space. The game itself was unassuming enough; this was something Alec had played repeatedly with friends back home.

Ness had gathered four sevens, and started to try to use telekinesis to pick up one of the spoons without reaching towards the center. Steadying his mind, he managed to get ahold on one of the spoons with his mind while trying to retain enough concentration to keep the card pile next to him from building up. 

Suzie, sitting next to him, noticed out of the corner of the eye that the center wasn't quite symmetrical, and looked at the ring of spoons. One of the spoons was clearly being telekinetically lifted. As soon as Ness managed to drag the spoon to his leg, Suzie reached over and grabbed a spoon. It clanked with the other spoons, causing the other four players to go into a grabfest for the three remaining spoons. 

Alec was wrestling Irene for the last spoon. Alec, who was undergoing training for Smash, managed to twist Irene's arms into an extremely uncomfortable, almost painful position, by leveraging his force on the spoon. Irene released her grip gradually, yielding the spoon to Alec and knocking her out of the game. With another player out of the game, Alec took a bit of focus off the game. If only getting Ness's respect was this straightforward. 

===

At the stadium, Sheik finally met her match against Mario, who claimed a victory by nearly two-stocking Sheik on the third match. Robin didn't breathe easy, though: Mario was almost as unfavorable a matchup as Sheik. She reviewed the notes against Mario she scrawled in the middle of her Nosferatu tome, slightly trembling in anticipation of the match. 

After all the day's matches were done, Mario emerged from the quarterfinals as one of the four that would continue through the winner's bracket for the tournament, and both analysts were publicly telling the other to eat their words. On one hand, both koopalings and Bowser Jr. were knocked out quickly, and the Robin ditto match wasn't nearly as hype as claimed. On the other, Sheik was knocked out rather quickly, and didn't ascend the brackets. 

===

At dinner, Robin got sore hands from the fistbumps and high fives she received from the multiple interns that saw her get close to winning the quarterfinal bracket. Lucy and Morgan, standing by Robin's side, met and got to know a few interns that took a second to kneel down to their level.

===

Zelda, just finished changing out of her sheikah outfit, traversed the same path she usually took. Jacob ran into her on the way, and noticed her expression. 

"Come on. Cheer up! You were impressive out there!"

"I don't fight to look impressive. I fight to win."

"Really? You're leaving yourself out of most of Smash."

Zelda took a second to explain at length. As many knew, Zelda held the triforce of wisdom, and Ganondorf held the triforce of power. While Ganondorf enjoyed using his triforce power to look flashy and awesome stomping and force-choking other smashers, Zelda took the time she had in Smash to perfect her fighting and gain familiarity against all sorts of combat. With Smash as swingy as it was, the only measure of performance in Smash combat Zelda considered objective was win rate, and it was the metric she used to keep track of her combat skills. The triforce of wisdom gave her vast wisdom and magical power, but it didn't do squat to sharpen coordination, reflexes, or muscle memory. Zelda had to maintain those herself, just in case Ganondorf came knocking again. 

===

Multiple people were vehemently arguing about the recent lynch in the Mafia game. The pink-haired villager stood by, amused at the level of roleplaying that they were doing. She didn't have as good a handle of mafia hosting as some of the other villagers, so when she opted to take the first count, a great discussion about who to lynch was interrupted. It resumed, but by then, a bunch of hidden opinions were blown open, and it didn't take long for a majority that, no doubt, included at least a few mafiosos, to get another townsperson lynched on the next count. 

Julia, coming back from Mafia, delivered a quick summary of what happened during that in-game day to Stacy. She had a suspicion that someone was Mafia, but wanted to hold back judgement until she could get evidence to confirm what her gut said. But when the villager counted the vote first, she had to spill it. And that spilled opinion became the bandwagon that got hitched on by a lot of people. Turned out she had her suspicions on an innocent townsperson. 

===

Up on the Smash mansion roof, Rosalina was using a large telescope with lasers to take a look into the night sky. A curious intern made it up the stairs before being intercepted by a luma. 

"Rosalina is busy with her children right now. Is there something you needed to tell her?" 

"You kidding, right? She's looking at a telescope, not being with her lumas."

It sighed. 

"You see, when lumas transform, they become celestial bodies of sorts. Rosie is taking a moment to look over the skies and check them."

"So she's busy doing what?"

"She's checking galaxies, stars, planets, you know."

"And what does this have to do with her so-called children?"

"Never mind," it said as it cut through the crowd of lumas asking Rosie about transformed lumas. In her usual downbeat tone, she told them that one of their favorites had exploded in a supernova and was now a neutron star. The intern bothered another luma, who basically gave the same answer about what Rosalina was doing as the other luma did. Mistaking a lack of comprehension for lack of explanation, the intern, who in their mind was rebuffed without seeming reason, stormed down the stairs and went to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who lack a monado:
> 
>   * That tournament bracket is in a data serialization format known as YAML. It's designed to be human readable as well as computer readable. If you don't understand it, don't worry. The exact contents are not going to be critical later. 
> 



	6. Friday, June 10

At 9:30, Suzie got up on her own, slightly aroused by the alarm she set at 9:00. Upon looking at the phone, she figured she would be late to training if she didn't hurry up, so she quickly put on a functional set of athletic clothes, and ran out without brushing her teeth, doing makeup, or neatneing her hair. At the dining hall, she nabbed a breakfast calzone with a dash grab and made her way to training. Once there, she realized she forgot her sword, forcing her to run back and get the sword before returning. 

Once at training, she greeted Lucina with a bow, then stepped into the simulator. The computer-simulated fighters inside were easy enough. Counter, combo, and dispatch with a high-knockback sword swing. When Lucina knocked on the side of the simulator, Suzie took a moment to finish off another computer fighter before stepping out. 

"Suzie, I think I know where you could improve."

"Yes, Lucina?"

"You're making your actions too obvious. If you hope to catch an opponent inside that triple blade of yours, you're going to have to trick them into attacking into it."

Lucina stepped into the simulator with Suzie, and unpacked an exercise she managed to put together while watching Suzie. This was a match between the two of them, but for the purposes of the exercise, Lucina would only move when Suzie moved. When Suzie approached with a counter, Lucina would refrain from doing anything, then went in for a grab as soon as she was no longer in position. When Suzie swung, Lucina would do her counter, or shield, depending on the attack. When Suzie grabbed, Lucina would outprioritize her with a jab. 

Suzie quickly figured out that Lucina was able to predict and counter whatever she threw out because she was telegraphing her movements. Then gradually, Suzie began to be trickier with her actions. She first threw Lucina for a loop by starting a grab like a parry. Then she did it again, shielding with an approach that resembled a dash attack. Lucina gave her approval to the mix-ups as Suzie came up with them. 

===

Meanwhile, in a different section of the traning room, the Mii Gunner was explaining the concept of the neutral game to seven interns. As she explained it, neutral was a game state where neither player had a strong positional advantage over the other. One's objective in neutral was to lead into a combo, where further follow-ups could rack up more damage and/or send the opponent into an unfavorable position. As the Mii gunner exposited, she made it clear that she was proud of the long-range that made her one of the strongest neutral fighters in Smash. 

The Mii brawler soon followed up, explaining that while he didn't have so many long-range moves as the Mii Gunner had, he still had a reasonable neutral game, moving and attacking quickly. While the Mii Gunner could stand back and rack up damage from afar, he had to approach in the neutral, but his power and agility gave him the edge in hand-to-hand neutral confrontations. 

This naturally led into approaches, which the Mii Swordfighter went with. With cameras streaming, he went into a simulator, and demonstrated some basic means of approaching a sandbag. Walking: slow but easily leads into other options. Running: more predictable, but faster and can be finished with a dash attack or a long-range grab. Jumping: opens up the possibility of aerial attacks, in exchange for a loss of shielding and grabbing. Other options were possible depending on the fighter, but the mii fighters wanted to reinforce the fundamentals before going into depth. 

In the simulator, the mii fighters took turns showing what neutral combat looked like against the interns. The first intern was a grappler, and short hopped into a command grab onto the brawler, who was similarly approaching the center. He was fine. 

The second intern tried to do a wavedash towards the mii swordfighter but only ended up with his face in the ground. After that, he just walked up and started a dash dance in front of the mii swordfighter, slowly approaching, then slowly backing off, slightly confusing the mii swordfighter. He was fine too, though they might have to shake other Melee-era habits shaken out of him. 

The third went and did a running approach at the mii gunner, but then rolled when the mii gunner jumped up. On her way down, the mii gunner quickly punished the bad approach by swiping her arm cannon. She walked out of the simulator, and the mii swordfighter told her that rolls tended to be too punishable and best used sparingly. 

The fourth walked towards the mii brawler, but then stood up and did a forward swing with a battle axe. It was clearly going to miss the mii brawler, but to her credit, it was in the right spot to punish a dash attack from him, and it was a long range disjointed attack with little endlag. 

The fifth took her shotgun, walked to midrange, and aimed it towards the mii swordfighter, who then charged in. She cancelled her shotgun aiming and shielded in response. Her approach and response was possibly fine, but the mii fighters weren't going to find out until later. Did she shield intelligently or impulsively? 

The sixth did an empty short hop, then charged a down smash in front of the mii gunner. She wasted no time, charging a charge shot and unleashing it as soon as he released his smash attack. The mii brawler told him that it was unwise to use smash attacks in the neutral, especially in the beginning of a match. 

The seventh did not approach at all, sitting in the back and getting the brawler to approach with slung rocks, then started playing keepaway with a mace. The brawler figured he should roll in to test his reaction, which was to run away and maintain a wall, doing a bit of grab-fishing in case the mii brawler tried to roll in again. He was all right. 

===

On a treadmill, an intern was sprinting, and was almost out of breath when he tripped the treadmill's emergency switch with his hands. However, the treadmill's momentum caused the belt to keep spinning, causing him to fall off and sprawl over the floor. The pile of a man, equal parts fat and muscle, was quickly noticed by a robed penguin. 

King Dedede approached the intern, intent on finding another way to one-up his old pink puffball rival. Without even bothering to check to see what other commitments he had, the king told him, 

"Hey. Let's get you prepared to fight!"

The intern grasped for objects that were slightly higher, and started pulling up on them. In his state, he couldn't parse what King Dedede told him. 

"Alright..."

King Dedede pulled him up and handed him a mallet to start training with. Griflet, as he liked others to refer to him as (his legal name was much longer, and foreign to boot), was understandably confused. 

"...What are you doing?"

"You said you wanted to train with me, right?"

"Wait, what?"

===

At lunch, Stefan took a ladleful of the goop. What this white stuff was, he didn't know. It resembled some kind of porridge, but it wasn't any kind of porridge he had eaten before. 

Up in the third floor lounge, Ike's projector setup from yesterday was still there, and Ike had already turned it back on. This time around, he was sitting alongside the mass of interns there. He fist-bumped an intern that came in, accidentally causing him to spill some of his lunch. A few footstools later, all that was left of the spill was a mass of rice paste surrounded by a carpet stain of porridge juice. 

Near the changing rooms, an intern was almost done loading up a backpack with ammo. After he called that he was finished, the Mii Gunner picked the backpack up, but it wasn't sealed. The contents of the backpack spilled out, forcing the first match of the day to be delayed. 

At the center, Gunner picked a loadout of Grenade Launch, Flame Pillar, Cannon Uppercut, and Absorbing Vortex against Ness, who in turn counterpicked PK Freeze, PK Fire, Lasting PK Thunder, and PSI magnet. They gentlemanned Smashville, and soon Mii Gunner was playing a keepaway game against Ness. 

As the Mii Gunner continued walling out Ness, she suddenly froze as a batted grenade flew right back at her, which Ness used to grab Mii Gunner out of her reactive shield. A down throw later, Ness had the initiative, and took to evening the percent lead Mii Gunner had accumulated. 

===

Back in the training room, Ganondorf stood by an intern, who had just finished up his lunch. Ganondorf was showing him how to reanimate a skeleton, and had a fish skeleton from the kitchens ready. Unlike the remains that Oren would encounter in the field, this one was fresh, and cleanly separated from its flesh. First things first; the complications would come later. 

For fifteen minutes, Oren dry-runned the steps of the spell repeatedly, while Ganondorf corrected his numerous mistakes. Then he actually took to the precise sequence and timing of spells, and the fish skeleton was suddenly flopping around like a live fish out of water. Oren was frightened by the sudden change, while Ganondorf barely managed to hold his laughter. He took the fish skeleton and snapped it in half to make it stop flopping around. 

Oren decided now was the time to throw out a question that he, and numerous others, wanted to ask since Ganondorf came onto the Smash scene as a brawler. 

"Your magic skills are unparalleled. Why don't you use them and sweep Smash?"

Ganondorf stopped, and crushed the writing fish skull into something completely unrecognizable. 

"...I wish I could. But I'm tightly bound to the commitments I make to Smash Corp. and my fans, and they want to see me as a brawler."

"And why exactly did you end up a brawler?"

"When found about Smash during the Melee era, they were looking for one more brawler, and I figured that, while I didn't have much experience as one, my triforce of power would give me the strength I needed to beat my opponents into submission, which I did quite well. 

Four years later, the brawl era came. They were taking up applications again, and I submitted mine, registering specifically as magic user. When my acceptance letter came, I thought that I would be finally be able to use my magical powers… until I actually read it and found out they still wanted me as a brawler. 

It's not like me to dick on poor play, but it's hard to complain when your fanbase will cheer you on for stomping on heads and delivering chokeholds."

===

In a neglected field next to the stadium, Patrick was repeatedly stabbing a sandbag, exercising his combos just as Lucina suggested she do while she was fighting in the tournament. Patrick did an upwards thrust at the bag, sending it up and out, then he ran after it, and managed a forward thrust in the air into the bag before it went out of reach of the epee, and the bag stood back up. That was a reasonable 21% combo. 

Then he tried some other kinds of combos. He grabbed the bag, threw it down, thrust his epee straight up at the now-aerial bag, and finished by jumping, turning around and swinging his gloved fist at it, sending it a respectable distance. Twenty meters. Not enough to send enemies into the blast zone, but enough to force them to use their recoveries. 

Finished trying to pause a Vine clip with frame-perfect accuracy, Suzie picked up a bat and sandbag and approached Patrick. From what she remembered from watching Smash during her childhood, the field Patrick was standing on used to be a primary training area before Master hand managed to set up a whole room of training simulators. 

"Are you done yet? I want to try something."

Patrick whiffed an up aerial on the bag, which unceremoniously landed onto the ground, before stepping off the platform. Suzie then took her sandbag and bat to a top platform, then climbed back down to open a panel. 

"Patrick, when I get to the top, press the green button."

Patrick took a look at the panel. There were two green buttons, the first of which Patrick pressed. Nothing happened. Then Patrick tried the second button, a barrier came up, and Suzie started hitting the bag with combos. She first hit the bag repeatedly with down tilts, then forward tilts, then caught the bag in a command grab to floor it. Then she took a down smash, causing the sandbag to ricochet repeatedly against the barrier. 

"Five… Four… Three… Two… One… "

Suzie then took the bat and whacked the damaged sandbag, breaching the force barrier. The sandbag went flying over the stadium side… and flying… and flying… 

Lucina was eliminated against her match versus Ness, and went to the back field, where she left the two to train. The two interns were quick to infer her approach from the magenta-colored shirt she was wearing. 

"You two have been practicing combos on the sandbags like I told you, right?"

"Uh-huh." "Yep."

"Alright, let's keep at it. Where'd you two put the sandbags?"

"One of them is right here. And I'm not sure where the second one went."

In a house somewhere, a great thud was heard, emanating from the roof. Then the sandbag rolled down, and landed with a lesser thud in a backyard somewhere, to the confusion of a completely ordinary homeowner. At the same time, Luigi managed to land a hard read with his jump punch, causing the crowd to go wild, which diverted the three's attention. 

===

Julia made her way to the dining hall again, grabbing a cold sandwich and a bag of kettle corn and making her way to the other sixteen interns and two villagers. The pink-haired villager from last time was there, but this time around, was being monitored by a different villager to make sure she didn't do anything dumb this time around. 

Different people were arguing about whether Julia was Mafia or Townsperson. Julia had to fend off claims that she was Mafia, as was asserted by a handful of different interns. They never seemed to go away, but just when Julia was almost finished trying to argue against their points, a girl two seats away took to arguing with them. Then, when the vote came up, she voted first. Julia followed her lead, trusting her judgement, at least for now. 

Standing from the table, Julia grabbed a second bag of kettle corn, and stepped out of the dining hall. The girl introduced herself as Celia and suggested that they stick together for this mafia game. Julia accepted, but then quickly made a mental note to double check her trustworthiness before actually trusting her, and maybe not even then. The townspeople's victory in the game might depend on being able to keep Celia from holding her heart too tight. 

===

Lucas and Dark Pit were sitting next to each other with 3DS's, both loaded with The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes, trying to set up the multiplayer. Unsurprisingly, they failed, given that there were only two of them. Lucas spoke first. 

"Didn't we agree that you were supposed to bring Lucina along?"

"Yes, I reminded her to come, but she said she wanted to go with Chrom to some outrealm place and being a bunch of Shepherds over to the mansion. Should we try inviting others to the game?"

"Right. Wolf? Wait, no, he doesn't have a 3DS at all. Mewtwo--?"

"--Doesn't have a 3DS either."

"What about online? Wouldn't that work well enough with both of us having a copy of the game?"

"Come on Lucas. You know how much dick the third player sucked the last time we tried that."

"Robin, maybe? He brought a 2DS last time we played."

"*Sigh* He's with Lucina in that outrealm place. Looks like we're going to have to ask around and see who we can find."

So they went around the rooms trying to find someone with a 3DS or 2DS, starting with the familiar ones. First place was a Pokemon room, which Greninja shared with Lucario. As planned, they asked him if he could play their game with them. 

"Gre?"

"Nope. Well, next place is Luigi's, on the fifth floor."

There, they asked the same question. 

"Yes, but not today. My knuckles are sore from today's fights."

Lucas replied, "Should've known. He managed to climb to the top of his bracket."

Then it was to a room on the other side of the same floor, where Pit and Palutena stayed together. First, they asked Pit. 

"Sure… borrow mine. Palutena called me to monitor Skyworld for the weekend."

Then, when they took it and suggested to Palutena, she had a response ready: "There are better sources of amusement than clamshell plastic devices. Come, I'll show you!"

Next door was Viridi's and Phosphora's. Same question, similar answer from Viridi. They didn't bother to try asking Phosphora, since her attitude had gotten onto their nerves before. 

"I'm holding on to my DS until it breaks beyond repair. Not going to encourage Nintendo to keep pumping out waste products that nobody needs."

Game and Watch's room, on the third floor next to the lobby. 

"Beep. Beep."

Running short of breath, Lucas convinced Dark Pit to stop trying to find a third person to play with them, but Dark Pit wanted to hold out for just one more try. Ness's room they were at, on the sixth floor. 

"I wish, but no. I spent my dollars on the PS Vita."

Lucas was exhausted, and Dark Pit was bored out his mind, so they separated, and Dark Pit made his way to his room, and started his singleplayer game back up. Right before twelve at midnight, a noise emanated from below.

"What now?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who don't have a fortune-telling hammer:
> 
>   * The stuff about the neutral game is, to the best of my knowledge, true. My knowledge is probably bad, so don't take my word for it. 
>   * Yes, that stuff above is a homage to the Hot Topic Krew. Because of the nature of the work, such homages won't invade any characters. Case in point: Chrom really likes seafood, but to a realistic degree. 
> 



	7. Saturday, June 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Oh, and why are you so concerned about reaching 3000 words in each chapter? Huh?"
> 
> Shut up, valley nymph. I get to set my own goals and challenges, and making each chapter that long is something I set out to do, and none of your business.

Lucina, Chrom, Robin, Lucy, and Morgan were standing at the Smash outrealm gate. Anna was standing nearby, manning a counter supported by nothing in particular. 

"Hello. I'm Anna. How can I help you?"

"I believe that I've already reserved a round trip for five people from Smash to Ylisse, both main timeline."

"Hold on… do you have your tickets and ID's?"

Chrom took out his tickets and three passports. Robin had her driver's license out, and Lucina had her Smash employee card on hand. After scanning the tickets and checking each of their ID's, Anna unlocked a gate and let the five through to Ylisse, where they were immediately met by the Shepherds. 

"Chrom, long time no see!"

"Hey, Chrom!"

"Good to see you, Lucy!"

In turn, Chrom greeted several of the Shepherds himself. 

"Vaike! Virion! Maribelle! It's good to see my old friends again. Nowi! You said you wanted to live away from us. Anything happen there?"

"I became lonely and wanted to join my brothers and sisters again! Are we still family?"

"Yes, Nowi, we still are. Some of us have left, but even they hold their experience with us close to heart."

But since my focus is on Smash Brothers, not whatever they did in Ylisse, let's cut back to the Smash mansion. This trip to Ylisse was something that Chrom did four times a year, on average. He still had his job as Exalt back home, and he couldn't find anyone better to give the job to, so he kept working there. 

In the Smash mansion, where he stayed most of the time, he maintained contact with the rest of the government through a robust magitechnological communication network and went to work remotely, but some situations called for him to be there in person. And sometimes he just wanted to visit his friends. 

===

In the morning, it was time for breakfast as usual. Arwin decided to go to the bakery just down the street. It was an entirely straightforward path, and he could get something good from there. Maybe a piece of cake? Or a-- 

"Where are you two going?"

Huh? Arwin turned around, and found two interns following behind him. They were all able to recognize each other as Smash interns because of shirts they had received before they entered the theater. 

"I'm at the bakery to get breakfast," intern Pit replied. 

Arwin had pretty much the same answer in mind. 

"Same for me."

After the three made their way into the bakery, Blaise looked around, saying, "I heard from the Smashers that Star Cakes were a specialty here. Now where are they?"

Pit looked around for Star Cakes, but didn't see them. He did find a variety of other pastries, and hand-picked some poffins for himself. 

Arwin finally found star cakes alongside a number of pokepuffs labeled "Not for human consumption", then looked at the price tag. He was thinking about trying them out, but that thought went straight out of the window, so he just grabbed a sponge cake, and waved Blaise towards him. 

"Yes, Blaise, I found the star cakes. But look at the prices!"

Blaise looked at the price for a few moments, then picked up a star cake, walked straight up to the counter, and pulled out a handful of gold coins. 

"Still worth it."

Arwin and Pit stood behind Blaise, all three of them having breakfast in their hands. Pit consumed an acai berry poffin, but stopped when the bit of the breakfast he was chewing ended up soaking up all of his saliva. Arwin ate his cake much more slowly, knowing what would happen if he tried to take too big of bites. And Blaise knew she had splurged her money, and was trying her best to get maximum enjoyment out of her star cake, but wasn't experienced in doing so. Arwin snuck a bite of the star cake. It tasted of honey, sweet enough to add to the flavor, but not so much that it overwhelmed everything else. 

===

It didn't take long for interns to bring up Lucina, Robin, and Chrom being gone. Marth, Lucina's historical role model, Marth, was prodded on by some interns who logically figured that Marth would have some acquaintance with Lucina, and reluctantly spilled some details. 

"Yes, I've been back at Ylisse. Once, at Lucina's insistence. She had bothered me several times before to come with her, and once I relented."

Naturally, the interns there caught on to this, and got him to flesh out more of his experiences. 

"Alright, fine. Anyway, the trip itself was entirely uneventful. A far-down heir of the Anna name was there to let us through the gates to Ylisse, and the trip mostly consisted of walking in a path through some portals."

The interns couldn't be satiated by the piece of the tale Marth was giving them, so they kept pressing him on. 

"Anyway, the Shepherds weren't the sort of ragtag militia fighters that I imagined them to be from what Lucina described of them. They were a collection of volunteers from all walks of life alright, but they were highly skilled, organized, and disciplined. I was also surprised by how the women weren't just taking up the usual roles, but were also at the front lines, getting their hands dirty. But the thing that took me aback was that one of them was doing it in a wedding dress."

Marth subsequently heard variations on laughter. One intern was snickering, another one was laughing breathily, and a third was guffawing. As soon as they pulled themselves back together, Marth told them he was being serious that this did happen, which only caused the laughter to resume. 

"Oh gods… "

An intern put a hand on his shoulder and told him, "We just found it funny that the Shepherds figured out how to make use of a combat bride! Please tell us more!"

===

Ike's projector setup was still there, but was displaying a movie instead of smash matches. As the credits for Inside Out rolled, an intern made his way back to the main menu before asking the other seven watching what he should show next. As he was collecting suggestions, Ike walked in, and upon seeing what was happening, asked, 

"Excuse me, what are you doing?"

The leader of the group spent a moment to think of an answer, but one girl quickly spoke before the leader could respond.

"We're watching movies. You want to join in?"

"Sure. But next time tell me when you use my stuff."

Ike took the remote, and flipped through the movies he had on hand, finally deciding on an early release of an old favorite. 

===

As Suzie woke up, she heard Hagrid say, "You're a wizard, Harry." 

Naturally, she poked her head out, and saw Ike sitting with some interns in a dimmed room. As she expected, on screen was Harry Potter trying to make sense of his newfound wizard status. She got dressed, and made her way downstairs, where omelets were being served. She went back upstairs, and took a position next to Ike, who at that point was sandwiched next to two other girls. 

"Please give me some room."

Suzie scooted a bit forward, but was still well within Ike's personal space. At Ike's insistence, she scooted a bit more, and a bit more, but Ike had to ask two more times before Suzie left his personal space. 

===

Palutena sat at her preferred workstation up in the third floor, doing what she normally did. First, she checked the Pray program to make sure everything was going fine:

palutena@Smash_1337:~$ pray --count palutena --since 12-06-2016-00:00:00  
2689 messages

Plenty of messages from adoring fans, just like she expected. She was still getting used to seeing numbers in the thousands ever since the devs put together a website that allowed the public to post messages to the various smashers, but it wasn't anything she complained about. 

palutena@Smash_1337:~$ pray --list-deities --since 12-06-2016-00:00:00

No new updates since some lackey thought Alvis was “Elvis” earlier in May. Once in a blue moon, a new god would appear, but most of the entries that would appear would be misspellings by people who were confidently wrong about some known deity's name. 

She could trust that the cron job that ran every Saturday night would work. Viridi, Phosphora, and she would receive her messages in a neatly packaged log file on each of their respective desktops. Alvis would receive his messages through FTPS, signed by her PGP key. Naga would receive the messages similarly, though whether she would actually check them was another question entirely. She didn't know what else there was, as she was tasked with just a few bits of that shell script. 

Then, she tunneled into her computer at Skyworld, set up a headset, and started receiving from Pit, her beloved angel. 

"No trouble to report, Palutena. However, one of our centurions had a heart attack while on duty, so he had to be given medical care." 

===

At lunch, Patrick was consuming a bacon hamburger when he received a call from someone unknown. He picked his cell phone up, and heard some kind of nasal-sounding man at the other end. 

"Boy, I have something for you."

"Um sir, I don't recall giving my number to you… anyway, go on."

"Okay, boy--"

"My name is Patrick."

"Patrick, you know Shulk?"

"Can you explain what you want about Shulk?"

"He's one of the Smashers. I want to challenge him at some point, and you and the other interns will be a great help to me."

"And where do I come in?"

"I have several claw weapons on hand. I'll entrust them to you, and you'll go into the simulators and gather information about their damage, knockback, and speed in combat. This information will prove useful to me when I challenge Shulk. Oh, and if you can, gather some stats about the Monado as well."

"I suppose… what do I get for my work? One of the claws? And where will I get the claws?"

"Meet me in front of the Smash building for the claws at 4 today. And I hadn't had that in mind. But now that you mention it, boy, maybe that'll be your reward."

"Again, the name is Patrick."

Patrick was expecting another response, but Mumkhar hung up the phone there. 

He then went to the front of the Smash building at 4, and there Mumkhar was, who handed him a pair of steel claws. Patrick then sprinted up to the simulator, put on the claws, and summoned a sandbag in training mode. 

Patrick swiped the bag in many different ways, and recorded the damage done by each method. A claw thrust, which would most likely be Mumkhar's jab, dealt 4 damage. Three different kinds of claw swipes, upwards, forwards, and downwards, dealt 5, 8, and 9 damage, respectively. Patrick also found that the upwards claw swipe easily chained into itself at low percents, allowing for damage to be racked onto an opponent with a little effort. 

A shoryuken-like uppercut dealt 15 damage, and sent the bag flying upwards ¾ of the way to the blast line. Just to see what kind of knockback growth it had, Patrick carried the sandbag offstage, then delivered another uppercut to a fresh bag. The base knockback wasn't much, implying the knockback growth was good. Patrick noted down that Mumkhar's up smash would most likely be a good, fast finisher, but easily whiffed and punished. 

Patrick then performed a short hop, and locked both claws into the bag, then withdrew them. 8 damage, autolink. Patrick followed up with an upward swipe. 10 damage, good horizontal knockback. And then an upward swipe. 9 damage, good vertical knockback. 

After noting down each move's damage and knockback, Patrick turned up the damage to 100 to determine the knockback growth on each move. Forward tilt sent the bag fling fairly far, not enough for KO's, but enough to quickly set up edgeguard scenarios. Back air was one of the strongest moves in terms of knockback growth, but didn't get the kill until 160 damage. 

Patrick executed several more of these actions, noting down more statistics about them, including how fast they were, how quickly he could change to different actions after each move, and the whole 9 yards plus. The forward swipe was slightly slow to recover from, but faster in the air. The downward aerial swipe was even faster, but had a smaller active window. 

Patrick also worked out some combos. Up tilt connected into itself 3 times at 0 damage, then could be followed up with an aerial. It connected 3 times up to 17 damage, then 2 times up to 44 damage. Up tilt connected into up smash up to 75 damage, and connected into short hop up air up to 84 damage. 

This was a hard and tedious task, but to Patrick, the improved equipment he could wield on his hands was well worth it. 

===

Ellen stood at a staircase on the first floor near some fire exits, and prepared for launch. 

"FIYARRRRR!!!"

After the fire ripped, Ellen was sent flying to the second floor, and nabbed the rail separating the second floor from the first below. Her grip wasn't quite enough to stay on the ledge, though, and Ellen slipped off, landing on her feet, but ending up on her butt after her knees gave as much way as they could. This was no problem to Ellen, who quickly wiped herself off and tried again. 

"FYAARRRR!"

Ellen had accidentally directed herself into the railing, and raised her hands up to absorb the impact. She bounced off of the railing mostly harmlessly, but then bounded into the ceiling, which she also absorbed by serendipitously holding her legs towards the wall, then went flying towards the wall, which she failed to tech and hit with her whole body all at once. For a second, she stuck there, then slid off and slumped onto the floor. 

Then Ellen got back up. The fire she had instantly recharged, and she had a third go at the recovery tool. Warming up… ready… to… 

"FIIYAAARRRR!!"

Ellen directed herself just over an edge, but hit her head against the ceiling. It took a few minutes after that for Ellen to realize she was still lying on the second story floor, and right next to where the door would open. And open it did, followed by Falco carrying her straight away to Doctor Mario. Doctor Mario, in turn, ran some scans and told Falco that Ellen could return to training on Monday, but to be careful not to let Ellen hit her head again. 

Falco told her, "I got you medical attention this time. But don't think I'll be there every time you fool around and hurt yourself."

Ellen told him, "Thanks."

===

After dinner, William took a path straight to his room, opting not to speak to one of his new friends despite having recovered from screaming too hard during the Ganondorf vs. others matches, especially Ganondorf vs. Dark Pit. His mind was spinning with all the things that had changed over the past seven days. It was just months ago when he was half-assing his way through Magical Theory 121, and he decided off-handedly to try for an internship. He got back to the email message saying he was accepted, and the rest was history, for him at least. Now he could rub elbows with the geek goddess of light, all four Italian mustached plumbers, that yellow eater, that pink eater, a pro boxer, a robed penguin, and an assortment of other wacky personalities. 

William then opened up an envelope containing a stipend. Eighteen hours of work, 200 gold an hour. That was before expenses, though. There were no income taxes, but Master Hand already deducted housing and dining expenses, leaving 1000 gold in the stipend. He plugged the numbers in, and found that Master Hand's stipend was okay. It wasn't that much above the minimum wage, but there were plenty enough employers that didn't bother to pay their interns at all. 

===

Julia, in the room below, gathered some envelopes, and handed the one labeled "Stacy" to Stacy, while holding onto the one labeled "Julia". They both opened their envelopes simultaneously, and in both of them were their stipends, each for the same amount of gold, 1000 of it. 

Stacy brought up the Mafia game again, and Julia explained that she had another close shave with more accusations. On the bright side, another Mafia goon was lynched, and Julia was starting to close in on who the remaining mafiosos were. 

As Julia took off her denim shorts and Stacy flicked the light switches in their room, a voice could be heard in an adjacent room. 

"You remembered the condoms, right?" said a male voice. 

"Shit SHIT SHIT," replied a female voice, followed by sounds of frantic redressing and a dash to the stairs. 

A moment later, the sound of footsteps came back, and everyone could hear the door slammed, followed by the sound of a latch being connected to the door. Then the male read out the condom instructions, and tried to follow them. 

Julia took out her phone, plugged some earphones into them, and tried to tune out the noise with music, but that didn't work. Stacy was pressing her pillow against her ears, but from what Julia could see, it probably wasn't working either. 

Following that, the sounds of a bed board squeaking, either partner moaning, and the varied sounds of flesh hitting flesh emanated from the room at regular intervals. Julia could tell from the noise that for both of them, this was their "first time", and were going almost entirely by high school sex ed and what they had seen in internet pornography videos. Stacy was grimacing, and Julia could tell that she was equally uncomfortable with the noises. 

As the male settled down, he shuffled on the bed and started lapping the female's crotch. Julia held down the up volume button, which finally caused the next door sound to be drowned out, but with nearly deafening music blaring into her ears, she wasn't going to sleep anytime soon. 

===

Dark Pit was sitting in his bed, and was able to hear the whole thing from above. He rolled over in his bed towards the wall, and said to the adjacent room's resident, "And this is what you were anticipating when you found out about this publicity stunt?!"

Phosphora was sound asleep, and in her dreams, she answered to a heckler, "Yes, thanks to this rally, I finally get to meet Bernie Sanders and see how he does against Hugo Chavez in the parliamentary election!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who aren't thousands of years old:
> 
>   * Cron is a Unix command that allows tasks to be set to be executed at regular intervals.
>   * FTPS is a protocol that applies TLS, which is used to secure connections, to FTP, which stands for File Transfer Protocol, and does what it says on the tin. 
>   * The Fire Emblem characters come from two different timelines. I'll leave it to you to figure out who goes with which timeline, but if it's ever plot relevant, I'll leave plenty of clues ahead of time. 
> 



	8. Sunday, June 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, I'm sorry for calling you that name. It was eleven at night, when I was about to sleep, and I was really looking forward to catching up on my sleep. But then you came out of nowhere and I wasn't ready to argue, so I tried to shoo you off as quickly as possible so I could actually sleep. 
> 
> Oh, and I support the Phosphora/Pit ship. It's cute... hey, Phosphora, come back! I'm still trying to speak to you!

Samus was woken up by a ringing in her right ear, rather than waking up to her phone alarm clock. She placed her right hand over the source of the ringing, and swiped the spot of light to the right. 

"Hello?"

"Yes, this is some guy at a desk from the office of investigation. We have a new bounty, and you might have an interest in it."

"If this is another case of some drunk driver skipping bail, count me out. I have better usages of my time. And besides, there are plenty of budding bounty hunters that need that money more than I do."

"This case is different. We've already tried contracting a number of different professional bounty hunters to catch her, but they've all come back empty-handed. Thus, the head decided to make the bounty public, in hopes that someone, someone, will catch her for justice." 

"Fine, I'll take a look at the case later. Right now I'm trying to sleep."

"Alright. We hope to see you soon."

Samus poked the red spot on the phone, then focused her eye just enough to read the numerals on the phone. 5:43, early in the morning as she expected. She might have gone back to the covers, but instead she extended an arm to reel in an office chair before sloppily positioning herself onto the chair and the chair to a desk with a laptop on it. She spent a moment trying to navigate her cluttered system to find out about this bounty before her eyelids drooped back down and her head landed on the keyboard, typing out two hundred pages worth of the letter J right in the middle of a text file she was going to direct into Adam's standard input stream later. 

===

At 8:00, Samus woke up properly to her phone alarm, and a handful of others set by interns. In her Zero suit, she quickly brushed and tied her hair back, then spent the next minute and a half aiming jets of water over her teeth, removing the gunk that inevitably developed over them last night, before leaving for breakfast. At the coffee tap, she stood behind a blob made up largely of interns, with Captain Falcon, Gaven, Princess Peach, and Riki on the outside. An intern shouted that the coffee tap was empty, and was quickly met by several hushes and some guy running to the coffee tank, then running off to refill it. 

The blob around the coffee tap dispersed, only to coalesce around the surrounding taps of decaf coffee and unsweetened tea. Samus followed the unsweeted tea group, and when it came around time to get her cup of tea, the man came back with a refilled coffee tank. Samus continued filling her cup, but Gaven left his place as second in the tea blob to rejoin the coffee blob that immediately formed. 

Samus joined Captain Falcon and an intern at a table with three seats. Captain Falcon noticed her immediately, while the intern was merely licking her eyes. 

"Hey, Samus. You're looking more awake than usual today. Anything happening?"

Samus knew this Captain Falcon well. He was Douglas J. Falcon, and was a onetime champion in the F-zero races sometime in 2006, when he inherited the Falcon name. His main profession, however, was bounty hunting, and racing was merely a pastime for him. After that race, he received an invitation for the Smash tournament, taking the place of Bart Lemming, a past Captain Falcon, who died in a giant reactor explosion, and was therefore ineligible for fighting in Smash. 

After Snake left to quit fighting for good, Samus had a brief relationship with Douglas. Samus didn't mind his slight nuttiness, but they had their respective bounty hunting missions, and they ended up spending far more time trying to set up and repair their respective ends of the network connection between them than actually communicating. Nowadays, Douglas was retired from bounty hunting and racing, and Samus found far fewer lucrative bounties, but neither of them bothered to start the relationship back up. 

"Thanks, but I'm actually more tired than usual. The investigation desk decided to call me early this morning to tell me about a new bounty."

"Cool! Maybe what you'll find will make your early awakening worth it."

Captain Falcon turned to face toward the intern, who, after some small talk, challenged Captain Falcon to some quick matches on Final Destination in the simulators. Captain Falcon accepted, and as if on cue, they simultaneously said, "Show me your moves!"

Samus kept drinking her now-half-filled cup of tea, and said, "You two have fun. I'll see what the intelligence office has in store." 

===

Lilly, now dressed for combat, picked at her scales on the simulator steps while Captain Falcon pressed the buttons to set the setting to two stocks each, no items, and Final Destination only. She knew Captain Falcon from his memetic phrases, but she didn't know how he actually fought. Guessing from his build, similar to hers, he was probably strong and fast. And did the pistol on his side make him a long range fighter as well? 

In the simulator, Captain Falcon and Lilly stood from opposite sides, and Captain Falcon started with his taunt of "Come on!". Lilly, pressured by Captain Falcon's pistol, quickly ran in, not knowing that the Captain never bothered to use it. Captain Falcon, not expecting Lilly to be a grappler, shielded, which Lilly quickly responded to by snagging Captain Falcon with her arms and promptly performing a throw on him. 

Captain falcon quickly rose back up, and rolled out after a second, catching her off guard. When Lilly finally got around to facing back to Captain Falcon, she was promptly greeted by a series of punches, which led into a series of kicks and knees. Lilly made use of her midair jump to get back on the ledge, where she was promptly met with a heel strike, knocking her down into the lower blast line. 

Off the respawn platform, Lilly stood, and kneeled at the edge of the platform. Captain Falcon was about to run in before he noticed her position, and stood in the middle of the platform, asking, "Anything wrong?"

"Can we stop fighting this match?"

"I was hoping that you would continue fighting, but alright."

Captain Falcon went to the opposite ledge and pushed a button underneath the ledge, one of several kill switches to let smashers who wanted to stop smashing stop smashing. The background reverted to a metal gray, and the two of them stepped out of the simulator. Lilly licked her eyes and rubbed some scales off her head on the steps on the simulator, then faced Captain Falcon. 

"Captain? It's nice to see your power, but, it's just, it goddamn blew my mind how much better fighters there are. It's like..."

Lilly didn't finish that thought, and Captain Falcon spoke. 

"I know. It's a common reaction to my personal embodiment of awesome. But getting there was half the fun for me. And though 3 months isn't much time, I can help you get closer to there. Are you open?"

"If I'm on the same line of thought as you, no. Doc Louis is currently working with me."

"I was under the impression that you were still looking for a mentor. Well, in that case, Doc Louis will help you be in top shape, but I doubt he knows how to grapple."

Captain Falcon prepared a handshake, but Lilly bowed instead. 

"I'll think about it. And I found the hard way that my hands are so clingy they hurt if I pull them out of a firm handshake."

===

Samus flicked a touchpad, causing the browser window to go down another screen. It took forever to navigate through the maze of a website to find information about the bounty she was looking for. But finally, she found it, hidden beneath a bunch of other web pages… 

Nope. It wasn't any of the usual things she would fight a decade ago. This wanted criminal stood at 5 feet tall and was female. She had nearly white skin, purple hair and clothes, and was very clever and very socially adept. Samus almost ran straight to her suit when she caught herself and reminded herself she would probably need to talk to Master Hand about this first, and budget the time and resources she would need to complete the bounty hunt. 

After checking to make sure she was still wearing a zero suit and hadn't taken it off in her room, she filled out an absence form to be excused for the week of June 26 to July 2, hoping to be able to fulfill this bounty within the week, and collect the 10 million gold attached to it. Were they desperate for her to be captured, or what? 

===

A villager was sitting in the dark corner of a dusty room. It was empty, as no one had the need for it. Or so it seemed to most of the Smashers, as the villagers in the room would indicate otherwise if they were found in their secret area. 

"Alright, I managed to fetch a picture of that file you wanted."

A different villager held out an arm, and the first villager unpocketed his cell phone, unlocking it and tapping on a picture icon before showing the picture of the file. It was from the security office, and it was a transcript of the security camera footage for a hallway on the second floor. 

"15:00 to 21:00, June 10, 2016. I was hoping you would retrieve the latest file, but this will do."

"Actually, they haven't put together the June 11 transcripts yet. If I needed to, I could serve up the raw video instead--"

"But we have better uses of our time than to pore over video! The security guards are going to do it anyway!"

The two villagers their heads away from the corner. There was the pink-haired villager. 

"Hey, hey. Be quiet. No one needs to know that we can speak."

The sound of someone walking beside the room could be heard. Both villagers quickly shushed the third repeatedly as a precautionary measure so she wouldn't say anything. The shushes themselves, however, were loud enough to be heard. 

The intern passing by didn't know that the room nearby was unused or that anything strange was happening, and passed right by. 

===

Back at the dining hall, Captain Falcon was still being tailed by Lilly, now changed back into her usual outfit, including gloves. Samus was sitting back at the table, drinking from a gallon container of ice water and operating a laptop. It was 5:00, almost time for dinner. 

"Sammy! What did you find? Has your early awakening justified itself yet?"

"Yep. They're offering 10 million gold in exchange for some girl's ass. From what I've read, she's wanted for fraud, hacking, and kidnapping charges. It should be a straightforward bounty hunt as far as I'm concerned, so I vacated just a week for it."

===

There, a deep growl sounded from their left. Mewtwo had a chokehold on an intern, who had dropped a plastic bowl of noodles. Mewtwo spoke right into her head, but strongly enough that even with his focused telepathy, neighbors could tell what he was sending. 

"I told you to stop treating me like I need further help. I mean it."

To the relief of everyone in the dining hall, Mewtwo didn't unleash any attacks, but merely laid the intern down to the floor before proceeding to telepathically pick up a ladleful's worth of soup. The intern quickly picked herself back up and ran straight out of the dining hall with soup still dripping off her shirt. 

===

"Is Mewtwo always like this?"

Male Robin was sketching a diagram on a pad of paper, and upon hearing the question, answered from what he heard while continuing to draw some arrows on the pad. 

"Well, it's a bit complicated. Mewtwo was infamously troublesome during the Melee era, and had to prove himself to be disciplined when he wanted to come back, resulting in his late entry. For the most part, he'll avoid situations that he used to erupt in, but it's still not wise to cross him if what happened back there is any indication. "

Robin looked at his diagram, and saw that the arrows were drawn out of scale on the approximate scale map of the Smash mansion third floor, going through walls and ending in an employee rest area rather than a bedroom. He then took a pencil eraser, erased the arrow, then continued erasing the spot where the arrow was until the graphite mark was gone for good. Then he redrew the arrow so that it actually went through the path he intended. 

Now he had the plan drawn out, and he showed the diagram to Blaise, Alec, and Griflet. On Monday, Tharja would come back with a lock-picking tome and try to break into Robin's room again. Griflet would wear a mask, wait in the opposite room, which was a spare room that nobody bothered to use, snatch Tharja's tome, and run off while Robin would shout the name of various spells while holding a spent tome to blindside Tharja. Griflet would be safe after that, since Tharja wouldn't know any of the intern's real names. 

One Griflet got the tome, he would pass the tome onto Blaise, who would then make photocopies of it, three-hole-punch the copies, and put the copies into a binder for Robin to enchant for later usage. The copy book would be used to check to make sure they had the right tome, while the original would be used for the actual plan. 

Then, on the day that Pit would be in the stadium fighting, Alec would challenge Palutena to a series of matches. They would be long 4-stock matches, and Alec would play defensively, but not so defensively that Palutena would quit. While that happened, Robin would use the tome to pick open the door to Palutena's room, then set up his stuff the room, which Palutena would see when she came back to her room. Freaking brilliant. 

"Alright, and realize that this is all in good fun, even if I spend more effort on this prank than I really should. If anyone might get hurt, it's completely fine to break away from the plan and do whatever it takes to keep anyone from getting hurt."

Robin handed Griflet a Superior Jolt tome, and told him that it was so that Griflet would be able to evade any magic attack Tharja might throw out. Griflet opened the tome, and saw that every single page had been soaked with black ink, rendering it unreadable and the offensive capability of the tome unusable. 

To hide their planning, Robin then flipped a page, and drew up some impromptu mad libs. Soon afterwards, they had a story about a unicorn using its casual horn to skewer a group of ghosts from Bionis, followed by Bionis correcting some imaginations. 

===

Back in the Mafia game, Julia was evaluating people making arguments, trying to figure out who was left in the Mafia. To keep everyone updated, a villager in a green dress wrote down the numbers of townspeople and mafia: 8 and 5, respectively. Julia was waiting for the right time to bring up her conclusions based on what she had experienced thus far. And now… was the time. 

"I think I've conclusively found one of the remaining members of the mafia."

Everyone was all ears. Julia then pointed to the girl next to her. 

"And it's her. Celia."

"WHAT?!"

"Ow! You're right next to me, in case you haven't noticed. Alright, anyway. Two days ago, she met me and tried to convince me to stick to her side in this game, not matter what. Yeah. Right. Like I'm going to fall for that common trick."

"Hey! I'm not mafia! You said that you--"

"Quiet! I was still speaking! Anyway, while I was down in time, I went ahead and looked up stuff about Mafia. In general, it's easier than on the internet, since one can watch for signs of deceit in face-to-face discussion. One of the easiest ways for the Mafia to overcome this difficulty is to bond with townspeople and convince them to not go with their reasoning. That's a trick I wouldn't fall for four years ago, and it's not one you all should fall for now."

Julia and Celia vehemently argued about this point, continually talking over each other and going from passive-aggressive to just plain aggressive in speaking and back and forth. The villager waited for the arguments to settle down, but couldn't find a point to pause the argument for fifteen minutes. 

Then when the villager finally came around to counting the votes, a marrow majority of votes were for Celia to be lynched, while a significant majority wanted Julia lynched. Celia was escorted out of the dining hall by the villager dressed as a referee, and the villager mastering the game wrote down that Celia was a doctor. 

"Dude, what the hell?!"

"FFFUUUUUUUUU--"

"Argh! Now we're in lynch or lose!"

"Nice job breaking it, bitch."

"*Jackhammer sound*"

Julia quickly dashed out of the dining hall, covering her mouth and nose with her left hand and her eyes with her right hand. After bumping into the wall a few times, since she was covering her own eyes. 

===

Chrom made his way back to the Smash outrealm through the outrealm gate network, joined by Lucina, Robin, Lucy, and Morgan, and also by Tharja, Tiki, Sully, Stahl, Lissa, Walhart, and Ricken. When they came back, it was 11:30. Stahl, by instinct, went to his usual room on the sixth floor, only to find it locked. When he came back down, he asked Chrom, "Why is my room occupied? Is this Wario and his money-making schemes again?"

Chrom, who was giving a refresher about the current Smash events to the other six, said, "No. I'm explaining what's going on right now. Maybe it'd be better for you to listen."

After the explanation was done, Robin led the kids back to their room, while Chrom led the seven shepherds to a nondescript office in the basement to get some rooms assigned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who don't design your own spaceships:
> 
>   * As I've already said, Standard Input, by default, is the keyboard. Unix allows for a lot of things to act like a file, including the keyboard, so naturally, with a bit of shell scripting, one can use a file for standard input. 
>   * There was never a Douglas J. Falcon in the F-zero series. Dunno where that one came from. So I crafted my own Douglas J. Falcon, who is hammier than the Captain Falcons in the F-zero series. 
> 



	9. Monday, June 13

At 12 at midnight, Griflet's phone sounded an alarm, marking the end of his nap starting from 7 PM. Griflet felt around for his phone, and read the time. Twelve. Robin told him through text messages that, thanks to some clever monitoring through a spell-activated webcam contraption, he knew that Tharja last tried to break into his room at 3 AM the day after she last returned. 

Griflet tapped his phone a few times to bring up a simple flashlight app, and turned it on before walking out of his room in his full-length pajamas, remembering to close the door and bring his tome and room key. Robin's room was near the roof of the mansion, on the 7th floor. 

On the way up the stairs, Griflet spotted a plump star, and picked it up. It was squealing too incoherently to be understood, but Griflet quickly inferred that it was lost. 

"ROSALINAAAA! There's a luma back hereee!"

Two different doors opened. 

Mario appeared at one door. "If you-a want Rosalina next time, she's-a on the fourth floor. There's no need to-a shout for other's attention around here."

At the other was no one. The door was just barely closed, and was bumped off of the door frame and swung open when Mario slammed his door open. 

After a few seconds, Rosalina popped in front of Griflet, who promptly presented the lost luma to her. 

"Thank you."

The lost luma quickly calmed down in Rosalina's hands, but then Griflet stretched out his arms, gripping Luma, and came close for contact. He started cuddling it, and the luma returned the favor by rubbing its head against Griflet. 

"Alright. There's your mama. Stay safe with her, okay?"

==

Two hours later, Griflet had his headphones on, listening to techno music at quarter volume from his smartphone, charged by a hand-cranked generator. He briefly stopped operating the crank, and briefly took off his headphones, listening for footsteps. There were no footsteps to be heard, but there were definitely voices. And those voices were probably not from Tharja, given how deep one of them sounded.

Griflet sat right up, rotating his head to determine the source of the sound. Facing forward, the sound was balanced in either ear, but when he rotated his head left, the sound started coming from his right ear. So the voices were in front of him. Naturally, this was the direction he crawled towards after tucking his phone and generator into his pockets. 

The voice spoke again, though in a much more hushed manner. 

"Alright, so we've got some intern hanging around up here at two in the morning. Dunno why he's here, and since this is the first time he's here, I don't have any prior observations to look back at. Yes, you can count on me to come back here periodically."

The receiver on the other end hushed the voice, then said something that was undecipherable to Griflet before hanging up with an audible beep. This sound was followed by a ring, another hangup, and several loud screen taps. 

Griflet followed the sound a bit more. With both ears open, he took a step, then another, then another, until he reached… nothing. He took out his phone, tapped it to open the flashlight app, and found… still nothing. Confused, he turned around, swept the area, and as he expected, found nothing. 

Griflet then decided to tune back out, and wait for Tharja to actually come around. The playlist had shifted a few spots, and when Griflet put his headphones back on, a k-pop song was playing. 

===

Thirty minutes later, Tharja actually came around to the seventh floor, just as predicted by Robin and anticipated by the crew. Griflet sat back and watched as Tharja set her tomes down, ready to do her deed. Griflet was neatly tucked in the room, behind a wall, so there was no risk of Tharja seeing him. 

Tharja picked up a tome, and started preparing it for usage. Griflet gripped his Superior Jolt tome with his left hand, and sneakily stepped up behind Tharja, ready to snatch her lockpicking tome with his right hand. Then Tharja opened it, and started reading it. 

"And now, I-- HEEEEYYY!!!! Come back here, you little--"

Griflet was madly dashing down the hall, and Tharja was about to chase him down when Robin took action and shouted through the door. 

===

Now was the time. Robin heard Tharja yell. He had sought this for a long time. She was already infatuated with the Female Robin from her timeline at that time, so finding about the existence of an alternate timeline Male Robin that she could S-support was something of a holy grail for her. Never mind that he was from a different outrealm, thought negatively about the Tharja from his own timeline, and didn't want Tharja to keep trying to make him love her. 

But now, instead of sitting helpless while Tharja, with her sufficient preparation, broke through all of Robin's barriers, he could actually disable Tharja and keep her from breaking in. With another ink-soaked Superior Jolt tome in hand, he yelled from the other side. 

"Elwind!"

From what he could see through the peephole in the door, this was enough to blindside Tharja and get her to stop facing towards the tome thief. 

"Nosfer--oh. So there you are."

Robin's most appropriate response to Tharja's words was to cover his face with his left hand. 

"Tharja, will you quit trying to break into my room?! I'm already having enough trouble with these new kids!"

===

At nine thirty, with his breakfast eaten, Griflet ran up to obtain his tome from his fourth floor room. He still had the tome to deliver to Blaise, and he almost forgot that he was supposed to deliver it. Pit's match wasn't until Wednesday, but not even the gods in the mansion knew what sort of weird shit could rise out of the madness that was the overfilled Smash Mansion and delay Robin's plans. 

With the tome in his bookbag, Griflet strided over to the dining hall, but was found by Tharja, who left shortly after Griflet did. Tharja stepped in front of him. 

"Have you seem someone with my tome, by any chance?"

Griflet restrained himself before replying, "Nope."

Tharja picked up Griflet's expression, and delivered a glare at him while he walked around her to deliver the tome to Blaise. Shoot. He might not be as safe as Robin thought. 

===

With the bag in hand, Blaise then went up to the mail room, which was also in the basement, and went to the front counter. When Isabelle asked her what she wanted to deliver, Blaise took out the bookbag and took out a lockpicking tome. Isabelle took the lockpicking tome and promised Blaise that it would be delivered to Robin soon enough. While in transit, she thought,“A lockpicking tome. I wonder what sort of tricks Robin is up to now…”

===

Now it was ten. Blaise followed the two Corrins down a hall to… somewhere. She didn't know exactly, only that it had something to do with her work. 

"Hey, Corn!"

The male Corrin turned around. 

"Hey. Your name?"

"Blaise."

"Oh, and for future reference, there's an 'i' sound before the n in my name."

And the female Corrin piped in. 

"And call him Cory so we don't get mixed up."

"Hey, didn't we agree that I was going to be Corrin and you were going to be Kamui?"

"No, I thought the agreement was that you were going to be called Cory and I was going to be called Corrin!"

"Why in the world should I be associated with that show? At least Kamui matches your Hoshidan origin!"

Blaise went with both of their monkiers, much to their mild annoyance. 

"Alright, Kamui and Cory. What was I supposed to be following you two for again?"

It took a bit for the two Corrins to decide which one was going to answer before the girl continued talking. 

"Right. Because Master Hand wanted to bring you guys behind the scenes in Smash, both to give his internship program some credence and because, well… what did Master Hand tell us again?"

"Well, the official reason was to show them what Smash was like behind the scenes. Anyway, follow us. ESL is expecting us to negotiate some Smash system contracts soon."

===

Palutena was at a workstation, waiting for requests to go through, when Tiki stepped by to chat. 

"Palutena!"

Palutena finished taking a sip from her gallon jug of warm, unseasoned chicken stock. 

"Tiki. Nice to see you again. Speaking of, I take it your months back at home have been uneventful?" 

"Yes, spot on, just as always. Chrom told me about these young adults that were invited into the Smash mansion to stay. I'm quite interested to see them."

"My job as of now is to help them along, so you might meet them. They should come along any moment…"

Sure enough, Gaven approached the two with a question, and Palutena was there to guide him. 

"Palutena? Who's that?"

"She's Tiki. She occasionally comes around to the Smash Mansion."

Tiki extended a hand, which Gaven extended his into. 

"Anyway. What was I here for? And while I'm here, hi Tiki."

"Hello. You must be one of the… interns, as Chrom put it."

Gaven faced back towards Palutena with his question. Palutena beat him to the first words. 

"You checked your problem with the workers you were assigned to, right?"

Gaven explained his problem, and Palutena directed him to some people that were better equipped to solve his problem. Over the course of two hours, Arwin, Jake, and Sylvester similarly approached her with their questions, though Jake realized what his problem was while trying to explain it to Palutena. Tiki noticed this pattern. 

"The last four people that asked for your help were all men. Is this not a fluke?"

"Yes… Let me explain. Master Hand, when finding interns, awarded positions purely on merit. I would normally be perfectly content with such a decision, but it happens that women are underrepresented in Smash and technology." 

"And you sat by as you saw this decision?"

"I tried to change this decision. I argued that women were still underrepresented in Smash and tech and that establishing some footholds would help them in and enrich our workplace, but he stuck firm with his decision to hire purely on merit. I'm a mere wetware administrator, so this was to be expected. And why are we discussing Affirmative Action in a comedic fanfic?"

Tiki thought, yes, Palutena was strange like this, referring to things that even Tiki, with her great power, couldn't understand, but she still liked her. 

===

Shulk was standing on the Smashville main platform, waiting for the countdown to begin. 

"Shulk, don't forget everything we practiced together last week."

"Yes right, monado art landing lag cancelling, edgeguards, that stuff?"

"It's for your memory. You don't need to repeat it back to me."

Three… Two… One… Shulk activated the Speed Monado art, and stood at arm's length from his opponent Dark Pit. It was easy to bait out reactions from Dark Pit, and Shulk was ready to react. Sure enough, Dark Pit tried to do a forward Smash. Shulk stepped back to avoid the hits, then stepped forward with a forward tilt to pop Dark Pit into the air. 

Several blows later, Shulk was at 30 percent with one stock left, facing against Dark Pit at 80 percent and one stock left. Dark Pit managed a grab into forward tilt and got Shulk off the platform. Shulk hopped forward, and then suddenly had a vision. In five seconds, Dark Pit was going to go below the stage and attempt a stage spike with Up Air. If nothing happened, it would succeed at securing the knockout. 

Then Shulk hit his head shortly before the vision ended. In a panic, he pointed his Monado upwards, and activated it. Dark Pit, who was ready to hop down and seal Shulk's stock, suddenly saw a blue beam next to his feet, which quickly extended up his leg. 

"GAAAAAAAAAHHH!"

Somehow, this averted the vision. 

One air slash later, and Shulk was holding the ledge, watching a bewildered Dark Pit settle down on the Smashville moving platform. Shulk lifted himself back up, and activated the Smash Monado art. Time to get this stock over with. Shulk charged forwards, did a forward tilt, and hung around the ledge, spiking Dark Pit when Viridi inevitably directed her Power of Flight right at the ledge with a down aerial. Game. 

Back in the mansion, a small group of interns was there to congratulate his hype play, even though it was a complete accident and he was subsequently eliminated in the second loser's match. Shulk didn't feel like it was such an accomplishment, but rode with the group's enthusiasm anyway. 

===

Inside their shared room, Julia was revisiting Angry Bird and Fruit Ninja, games she once had on her iPhone years ago but didn't bother to reinstall when she got the new models. Stacy stepped behind her on the bed, which she was aware of, but ignored trying to get another ten-fruit combo. 

"You're not going to join the Mafia game again today? It was going well the last time you reported back to me."

"I'm screwed. They were 2 friendly lynches away from the game, and I tried to seal the victory by identifying a mafia member. Except she was actually a townsperson, and since I was the one who blamed her and it's lynch or lose, I have a giant note labeled 'Lynch me' on my back. The game is that finished."

Stacy ripped the mess of colored paper, masking tape, and black permanent marker on Julia's shirt, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it into the room's paper basket. It bounced on the front rim onto the wall and stuck there, thanks to the masking tape. 

"Don't worry about that. I have an idea about how to salvage the game. And as you said, you have nothing to lose in this game."

"Alright, go in my place."

===

Stacy stepped downstairs into the dining hall, ready to deploy her plan. Except she didn't really have much of a plan besides trying the first thing that came to mind. She turned on her phone and stuck it into her front pocket. 

"Hi. I'm Stacy, and I'm filling in for Julia. Hold this."

The referee villager took the note and put it in his shirt pocket, not sure is Stacy was actually being serious. A man placed a hand on the table, and lifted himself up just enough to have his head above everyone else's. 

"Alright, so can you tell us why Julia isn't mafia?"

Stacy didn't bother to think, and just threw out the first thing on her mind, somehow keeping her voice straight the whole time. 

"She is."

The rest of the table spent the next thirty seconds staring in disbelief at her audacity. The villager tried to hold his laughter, but then at the end of those thirty seconds, opened his mouth with a super deep laugh, and hit the table while letting his laugh out onto the table while drooling. 

"Good one! ...oh wait why am I speaking?"

Another vote was conducted soon afterwards, and Stacy's random idea almost worked, with Julia lynched by a slim majority rather than the landslide that Julia expected. Back up in their room, Julia naturally asked, "Did you save me in that game?"

Stacy quickly replied. 

"Nope, but it was well worth it to go down there anyway. Here, take a look at the footage I recorded from it."

===

Patrick was back in his room on his bed with his claws. First, he took the claws apart, borrowing Stefan's pentalobe screwdriver to help unscrew the ten-pointed star screws that were characteristic of hardware from Bionis. It was a difficult chore, since the screwdriver kept slipping out of the screw, but Patrick made it work. 

Then he borrowed Stefan's sharpening stone and put on his chain-mail glove on his left hand. He took the topmost blade, then grasped it firmly while running it over the stone. He repeated this process for the other three blades, then spent an hour putting the thing back together with all of its fiddly parts. 

"Don't forget that I let you borrow my sharpening stone and screwdriver if you helped me sharpen two arrows."

Patrick didn't express any begrudgement. He simply took two arrows and spent his time sharpening both of them. Once he was done with that, he rested on his back holding his tablet above his face and watched Alpharad strap on various pieces of gear and disrespect random For Glory noobs on Youtube. 

===

Walhart sat in a chair in his room, munching individual baby carrots and celery sticks raw, without dressing, out of two bags of vegetables he bought from Walmart. A knock emerged from the right wall. 

"Who's there?"

"It's me, Tharja."

"Right. What's your reason for seeking my attention?"

"Some kid stole my tome, and managed to run away with it. I swear. I'll find that kid, and I'll personally--"

"Bring him to justice. While we're here, we're still under the law. Chrom doesn't want another instance of that thing that happened in 2014, and I'm not going to oppose him in that respect."

"Grrr…"

"Hey, guys. It's Tiki. Don't forget that most of the mansion goes to sleep around this time, and you'll keep a good number of people awake if you keep your chatter up."

Walhart walked away from the wall, counting his change, and planning his week. He wasn't going to conquer any more land, but he could become the best in something. And months ago in his mind, he decided that something would be Smash. It was combat, but with a lot less bloodshed and a lot more knockback.


	10. Tuesday, June 14

It was the first day of the Knockout 7, the seventh of a series of annual tournaments focusing on Smash-like combat systems. Knockout, though considered a mere major among the dozens of tournaments of its kind, was distinctive for its selection process. Rather than choosing the systems by commercial success or popular demand, Knockout called together a board of critics to choose its systems. Many a Smash clone's first major was at Knockout, and among the newcomers to Knockout this year was Tussle, the first open source Smash-like system to feature in any major. 

Of course, the most popular events of Knockout were the two different Smash systems: Melee-era Smash, codenamed back when Smash Corp. still used codenames for its major releases, and the latest version of Smash, Smash v4.1.2. Most of the hundreds that were set to compete put one of the two first in their applications, and Knockout's promotional materials focused primary on Smash. The proximity of the event to the Smash Mansion, a first for Knockout, definitely didn't hurt. 

===

At the Dining Hall that day, Gaven took a seat across and two seats over from Dunban, who was watching over a handful of shoulders huddled around an iPad while drinking a diluted brew of black coffee. Unlike the other interns, he was not interested in the matches. 

I, knowing something about Gaven by this point, having first heard of him from browsing Smash-related news, and learning more about him by attending his livestreams, sat across from Dumban and tried to engage Gaven in the spectating. 

"Hey, I heard that Tussle, an open-source Smash clone, made it in. Should be a good time to celebrate for the open source community!"

"Please… don't remind me."

"Remind you of what?"

"I spent hundreds of hours and logged thousands of commits to make OpenSmash the best it could be. And then Tussle beats OpenSmash into Knockout."

"Right, right, right. I saw your livestreams where you spent eight hours on end at a time to get OpenSmash well balanced. I hear you, and sympathize with the experience of putting lots of effort into nothing. But this is a moment that we should all share. It's not every day that open source gets a foothold in the public eye." 

"I suppose. But my interests are in creating good works, not watching random people rip other people's systems up."

For a moment, I thought that Gaven was serving up reasons for not watching one by one. But then I had a small insight: Gaven's reason for not watching was because he wasn't interested in watching no-holds-barred competitive play, not because of anything related to OpenSmash and Knockout, but I had made the memory of OpenSmash not getting into Knockout fresh in his mind, prompting his first response. 

I decided that this was a good time to stop trying to engage further with Gaven, and gave a quick glance at Dunban. He was facing in out general direction, and giving what seemed to be an expression of approval, but what he was responding to wasn't entirely clear. I personally didn't think it was us. 

===

It was much later, after we had left the summer internship, that I learned more about Gaven's efforts. Knowing Knockout's selection system, Gaven had spent the six months preceding the selection to continually tweak and tune OpenSmash's parameters and methods, and spent his time to find bugs and squash them without mercy, sometimes even bypassing the checks and balances that surrounded OpenSmash development to push his changes directly. 

Unfortunately for him, this effort was for naught, as Tussle was chosen over OpenSmash as the first open-source system to feature in Knockout. As if to rub the near failure in, out of the hundreds of groups that applied for their system to be in Knockout, OpenSmash came in a close 14th rank, but Knockout chose 12 systems, so his preferred system didn't make it in. Tussle was 11th, right behind Smash 64, the first iteration of Smash. 

Anyway, back to what I was saying… 

Since the schedules of the Smash Mansion internship and Knockout were extremely likely to conflict, none of the interns were there in the main events, and those that bothered to withdraw from the main events did. The days in between work, on the other hand, were plenty enough for the interns to participate in friendlies, side events, and money matches at Knockout. 

===

Walhart, having no such conflicts, stepped onto the stage for a Smash 4 pools match at 8:30 in the morning. After shaking hands with his opponent, the two struck stages until they came down to Battlefield, Lylat Cruise, and Omega Temple before gentlemanning to Battlefield. It was obvious that Battlefield's platform payout benefited the opponent, but for Walhart? Maybe it was a convenience pick. After all, it's named Battlefield. 

While his opponent charged up his staff with power, Walhart scored the ground a few times, prompting a stern stare from a referee. Then shortly before the match was set to begin, both players gave the okay, and the match started there. Walhart started by walking forward as his opponent tried to get a tether grab, which Walhart spotdodged on reaction. Piece of cake. 

His opponent tried to space by extending the tether and flailing it around like a whip, but Walhart knew his own armor properties, and made his way through the multihits to shove Wolf Berg's blade into his opponent's chest, which then led to another two hits before Walhart whiffed a fourth strike and ate a staff endcap to the face. 

===

Patrick and Suzie, who were here together, reached the crowd, and began to work their way through it. By the time they got to the front, Walhart had managed to throw his opponent offstage, and swept the ledge with his axe, just barely missing the two-frame as his opponent reeled in his magical tether and reached the ledge. A modest cry of "Walhart! Walhart! Walhart!" emerged from behind them. 

After a short time, Walhart missed a tech and took another staff to the head, this time directed downward and over the ledge. His opponent tried to capitalize on the situation by hopping off and whacking Walhart, but he accidentally fastfalled too far, allowing Walhart to jump on his head and swing his axe overhead, embedding it into the ledge to climb on. Walhart made it back; his opponent didn't. 

At the end of the match, a variation of the Fire Emblem victory theme with heavier beats played while Walhart gritted his teeth and tightened the grip on Wolf Berg as much as he could while posing. His opponent accepted the loss quickly and started thinking about which three stages he could counterpick to. Patrick snuck a picture of Walhart in this pose with his phone and sent it to Lucina. 

After Walhart convincingly captured another two games against his opponent, Patrick and Suzie left to start preparing themselves for the friendly doubles match they would be playing at twelve. A guy in a purple suit intercepted them. 

"You must be the interns from Master Hand's internship program, right?"

Patrick and Suzie looked at each other. Patrick was wearing the t-shirt that was handed out on the first day and a pair of faded-out red shorts, while Suzie had a similar t-shirt and some ink-stained blue shorts. 

"Yeah… that's right. We are." 

Right before Patrick could come out with another thought, the guy had a question out. 

"You doing anything here?"

"Yeah, we were just gathering our weapon for a friendly doubles match. It's nothing to bother yourself about."

"What a coincidence! I'll be commentating the friendly matches in the afternoon, and I'll be looking forward to seeing you fight." 

Patrick took a look at Suzie to see if she had an answer. Suzie had the same response as Patrick did. 

"Sure, I guess."

===

Fox walked up slowly to Falco and ~~down smashed~~ handed him a printout of a website. 

"There's a bounty out for this purple-haired girl. If we can catch her, we get ten million gold to split between ourselves. How does that sound?"

"Sure thing. It'd be a nice break from trying to teach Ellen how not to respond to pressure in Smash. And by the way, is it just us two?"

"I'll call the whole gang back. You know, ROB 64, Slippy, Krystal… you're not participating?"

Falco had his back turned to Fox, trying to weigh the new information into his decision. He then turned around. 

"Actually, yes I'm going with you. Just tell the frog to stay back. I'm not interested in delivering his slippery skin from danger again."

Then Falco promptly left Fox's room and gathered from electronics from his. 

===

Robin sat in a room, discussing yesterday's events with Griflet, who was concerned about his own safety. 

Griflet recalled how, shortly before he handed the tome to Blaise, how Tharja intercepted him, and while she did not pin any blame on him, he suspected Tharja had him squarely in her sights. Robin tried to assure him that this was typical of Tharja when angered, but Griflet still felt the same way. 

"So you're telling me that Tharja is like any other angry person when angered. Like that's a relief."

"Right. And if she has nowhere to point her anger towards justifiably, she'll eventually cool down and get back to normal business. Don't let her suspect anything."

"Understood. But what about the fact that we stole her tome? What are we going to do about that?"

"Well… Shoot. I never considered that this would be a concern."

"Excuse me, what?"

Robin glanced at his hand by chance. On there was the Mark of Grima. Robin then looked at it again. It seemed to remind him of something. Robin then collected himself together for a minute before he spoke again. 

"Tharja is a constant annoyance whenever she's here, so I didn't think twice about putting her in the plan, though, thinking about it, I have no reason to doubt that she was as great help to my outrealm counterpart as she was to Chrom and me. I'll figure out some way to make amends."

"I'll trust you in that regard. So what WILL you do?"

"Um, err… I… I'll have to think about it. I'll bring you back soon, when I have an idea."

"Alright, I'll trust you. See you soon."

A flourish played in the background, and Robin and Griflet reached support level C. 

===

Falco hopped to Shulk's room, carrying a bag full of electronics. After a knock pattern, Shulk hurriedly put on a shirt and shorts, then opened the door, and Falco gently lowered the bag onto the ground and loosened its drawstring. 

"Shulk, I'll need you to modify this equipment so that Slippy's voice isn't as high. Fox and I are going on another mission at some point, and I'll need to retain my own sanity throughout it."

Shulk asked Falco some questions about the electronics and what he wanted, and started deducing what he needed. Since Slippy's voice covered much of the same range as Krystal's, he figured the easiest way to satisfy Falco would be to shift the frequency of the entire communications channel down. And since the communications signal was digital before it was combined with other signals, it would be easiest to implement such a change in the hardware that combined the signals. 

Shulk assured that Falco would have his modified electronics by the end of the week, and started by popping a memory card out of one system and putting it into a card reader. 

===

Patrick and Suzie got back from preparing their Smash gear for the doubles match. Patrick had an epee and a freshly sharpened set of claws, and Suzie had her gripping triple blade. Both of them were ready for combat in Smash. Before they left, Patrick made a run for Lucina's room, and knocked on her door. 

"We're going for a friendly doubles match soon. If you want to watch, we should be on the friendlies stream soon."

Lucina nodded her head and wished them luck, then directed them both out of her room and gently closed the door. 

===

Outside, Patrick followed Suzie over three consecutive stretches of block lengths north and west. The excited atmosphere for Knockout was unmistakable, making navigation to the general area easy. Participants were going away from the tournament to eat, rest, go to stores, and other activities, and others making their way back to the center. The virtual queues for the Melee and Smash 4 simulators for doubles were 120 people long, while the ones for the system with the next longest doubles queue, Rivals's, was just 80 people long. 

Patrick and Suzie opted to get a pass for the shorter Rivals queue, but the lengths were deceptive, as the Rivals queue was rather slow-moving, while the Smash 4 queue, while long, moved quickly. After fifteen minutes, Patrick noticed that the Rivals queue was going through at the pitiful rate of 1.5 people a minute on average, while the Smash 4 queue moved much more quickly, at about eight people a minute. After about five minutes, they generously handed their passes to some random bystanders who wanted to use the Rivals simulators more, and obtained passes for the Smash 4 line. After fifteen more minutes, they were at the top of the queue, and an intercom called for them to go to the front and prepare for a match at once. 

When the two managed their way through the crowd, they met their friendly opponents. They held some imitation keyblades, but unlike the keyblades that the two heard about from word-of-mouth, these imitations had no relation to multiverses and were in the form of lances rather than swords. Suzie gulped silently, remembering the Fire Emblem weapons triangle. 

As the four fighters unloaded themselves onto the four platforms of Battlefield, the purple-suited announcer started speaking. 

"And here we have some interns. I believe they were getting some training from in the Smash mansion, so let's see what the Smashers have shown them. Oh! There's first blood, a keylancer managed a whiff punish on her laggy sword strike." 

===

Watching the stream, Lucina started making notes of what her two trainees were doing. Suzie was still throwing out her sword way too casually. The commentator kept speaking. 

"Alright, they say that in the Fire Emblem universe, Lances beat Swords. Though last week, we had a tournament in Ylisse where one sword-fighter fought his way through a bracket full of lance users, so they probably have a chance."

Then, onscreen, Patrick was grabbed, then forward thrown straight into a waiting lance tip, which sent Patrick off and away, causing him to lose his first stock. Lucina wrote a few things down. 

"And she manages a counter trip. I'm guessing that she'll manage two hits if her opponent's DI is correct… one… two… she's running back to neutral. Last time we heard about Suzie, we found out that it doesn't combo more than two hits, so this is probably for the best."

"Lucina, are you going to come down for dinner? It's almost six thirty, and they have your favorite, salted pork belly, ready!"

Lucina recognized her mother's voice and the food in question, but opted to focus on the match. Patrick and Suzie were gradually worn down until they were knocked out, and their adversaries had a total of three stocks, and a modest percentage level. 

===

In the dining hall, Oren took his steak, and cut a small sample of it to try necromancy on. Then he started to cast a revival spell, this time with a renaturing spell beforehand to renature the proteins, nucleic acids, and such so the necromancy spell could reassemble the parts. Then he cast it. 

Oren had neglected to check exactly how much of a system the necromancy spell needed to work, so the little bit of cooked muscle tissue didn't get revived. On the other hand, there was a tapeworm that happened to have lived in it at the time it was cooked, which the necromancy spell revived, and, sensing the hot environment within the muscle tissue, it quickly wriggled its way out. 

Needless to say, Oren almost tripped from a small juice spill trying to throw his plate of steak away, and didn't eat any more slices of beef for the next week and a half. 

===

On a laptop, Ellen was engaged in a heated chat room argument that started that morning about Ike and his eating habits. Ellen put forth the argument that the oft-cited anecdote about Ike having eaten beef for weeks on end was looked into by a newspaper, and they found nothing wrong with it. 

<2second_knockout> You see?  
<2second_knockout> And that rumor must have come from somewhere  
<2second_knockout> People don't make up shit about legends when their stories are interesting

And then the other person responded. 

<fieryLiquidNitrogen> beef doesn't have vitamins  
<fieryLiquidNitrogen> we don't have reports of ike having night vision problems, muscle weakness, or anything like that  
<fieryLiquidNitrogen> ike got his vitamins somewhere, and it certainly aint beef

Ellen then poked Ike, and asked him about the rumor. Ike finished rubbing a head a broccoli into his well-done steak. 

“Yes, I ate beef for several weeks off-duty. But I didn't eat beef muscle. As a cost-saving measure, I specified beef organs from different butchers. It was a bit hard to convince that a hero like me would want beef organs specifically.” 

“Thanks for clarifying!”

Then she turned back to her computer and replied. 

<2second_knockout> I just asked Ike  
<2second_knockout> He says he ate cow organs  
<2second_knockout> That solves the vitamin problem, and the cost problems  
<fieryLiquidNitrogen> that supports my point  
<fieryLiquidNitrogen> cow organs aren't beef  
<2second_knockout> They are  
<ternaryhatchet> this argument about ikes eating habets was pointless already  
<ternaryhatchet> *habits  
<ternaryhatchet> but this takes 40 cakes. bye  
ternaryhatchet left the room (Quit: leaving)

Ellen's pork and vegetables were getting cold and she had some research to prepare for Falco tomorrow, but come on, why couldn't she win this internet argument?

===

The metal bin of cured pork belly ran out, and even though several chefs were reassigned to cook more bacon, they couldn't catch up to the demand. Near the end of dinner, a glut of this food became available thanks to the work of chefs, but almost everyone had finished eating and couldn't eat any more. Mr. Game and Watch lamented the planning of the kitchen before spending half an hour with the rest of the kitchen procuring containers and sealing them up for tomorrow's breakfast. After that, he stepped into a liquid crystal display and started exhaling the letter Z repeatedly and relieved the day.


	11. Wednesday, June 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please excuse the large hiatus that I had. There's a thing called finals week, and another thing called studying... 
> 
> "It's good you have your priorities in order, but--"
> 
> This is a passion project, and it didn't seem like a good idea to skip studying and testing just to keep storytelling.

At one in the morning, William was under his covers without his clothes on, and looking up rule 34. With his left hand, he tapped repeatedly on a phone screen and typed out P-A-L-U-T-E-N-A. There was no shortage of material of her, since she didn't mind the attention, and as of recently was actively cultivating it. 

Then he scrolled down for the images. Of course, since the internship program started, there were also images of interns in some really lewd positions. And inevitably, some of them put the interns together with the Smashers in these positions. 

As he scrolled, he started recognizing interns. What was Blaise doing with Phosphora with Palutena in the background? It was still hot and the drawing still good-quality, so he kept going. Another flick, and someone he didn't recognise was wearing one of the distinctive shirts they were handed on the first day and doing something with Palutena. Still decent, though not as good. 

And then a third one, of him cuddling naked with a villager. Wait, what, him!? Another brief glance at the picture confirmed that this really was him. William glanced away as he maintained just enough of a view of the phone to tap the back button and navigate to another picture. 

===

Outside at eight ten, AR was still in pajamas, trying to meditate near a garden pool. He read on his phone how to meditate. After a few minutes, he then sat down and tried to relax with the sound of dribbling water from the fountain and the wind knocking plants around, ignoring the general din from behind him. 

After a few minutes, though, AR got antsy. No one distraction was responsible, but his current stress state and inexperience, the tickling feeling beneath his feet, and the high pitched noises coming from seemingly nowhere combined to make it nearly impossible for him to meditate. AR started subconsciously yanking at the grass. A few blades gave little resistance, but something was giving more resistance. He pulled harder. 

Suddenly, the stalk stopped giving resistance, a red bulbous plant emerged in AR's hand, and AR picked it up to look at it. It squeaked loudly and looked alarmed in AR's strained eyes, and heated up rapidly. AR cast it away after managing to pry it off before it burned him, intent on resuming his meditation. But why was there crackling and smoke? 

Yep, flowers were burning right next to him. 

AR forced his eyes open, then tied his shoes back on. His first thought was to stomp out the fire. Unbeknown to him, Viridi was starting to mend the garden, and saw him stomping on a flower patch with smoke rising. This quickly prompted her to run to the scene. 

"This is just human. I swear… " she muttered under her breath. 

When Viridi finally managed to get up to AR, she was at a loss for words, instead expressing her anger as a mess of vocalizations not unlike what Link sounded like when ranting. 

"Don't worry. It's not what it looks like."

Viridi only got more riled up in response. She gave up on trying to form coherent words, and just ran back to the building for help. She yanked AR along to the back atrium of the Smash mansion, where they both met with the first mediator that took their case. This happened to be Pit, the angel. 

"Viridi. Is anything wrong?"

Viridi still couldn't spit any words out, so he suggested that they discuss the problem in a moment, after breakfast. AR followed his lead, with Viridi's grip pulling her along, following only slightly willingly. Some breakfast and some separation from the event ought to help calm Viridi enough to let her speak. 

In the dining hall, Viridi was consuming a scoop of organic granola soaked in a cup of raw milk straight from a miltank. AR also ate a scoop of the same kind of granola, but in pasteurized 1% milk. Pit sat between the two, eating a muffin, ready to mediate once either of them wanted to speak. Once Viridi finished her bowl, Pit faced her and asked, "What happened back there? Something must have happened for you to be lugging an intern to the mansion screaming."

Viridi slammed her spoon down onto the bowl, causing it to turn over and land on the rim of her tray. 

"Shouldn't it be obvious? AR was slamming his foot on pikmin and creating fire in the garden!"

"He doesn't seem to be looking for trouble." 

Pit looked down at the name tag. 

"Arnold Reiner--"

"Just call me AR. Go on."

"AR doesn't seem to be looking for trouble. Maybe he can give his side and shed some more light on the situation? AR, what do you have to say?"

"As I've said already, it's not what it looks like. I was trying to meditate by the pool, and I started to pluck my plants. One particular plant became burning hot, and caused a fire when I dropped it. The stomping you observed was me putting out that fire. If we go back outside, I can point you towards it."

"It's worth seeing if it's true. AR, Viridi, let's get going. "

Viridi felt like she had little choice but to go along. Out in the garden AR identified this location in the middle of a charred area, where a mess of sticky, clear syrup surrounded a blacked-out red pikmin. 

AR asked, "See, Viridi?"

Pit was quick to recognise the intent of AR's words, and quickly replied, "We came here to evaluate your claim, not to let you establish superiority. Don't humiliate Viridi, please."

"Now that we all know that I wasn't acting wrong, can I go? Ryu is expecting me early this morning."

Viridi replied. "Nooo…"

Pit said, "Can you just hold on and apologize to Viridi?"

"Alright, fine. Viridi, I'm sorry that this burn had to happen in your garden, and I didn't know what else to do to stop it. Will you forgive me?"

"Why should I?"

As AR left for the bathroom, he heard Pit say to a still-peeved Viridi, "Viridi, let's get going. I have something wonderful to show you."

===

Somewhere, Walhart had made it first out of his first round of pools, and was facing against his first opponent in the second round of pools. 

"I am Rashid, of the Turbulent Wind. Remember my name well."

Walhart maintained his frozen-solid face, replying, "Why should I when you're just another fighter to be beaten by the Conqueror? But maybe if you win, I'll consider."

The commentators started speaking. 

"You know, Walhart has substance to his words. As far as Street Fighters go, Rashid is low. He can hold his own in any fight, but he loses more often than not against the best of the best. Meanwhile, Walhart is power-ranked 6th in Ylisse, a highly competitive region that Robin and Lucina also hail from."

"Not to mention this Smash thing seems to be new to Rashid. In the first round of pools, he sometimes missed the ledge sweetspot, and though he's pretty good at recovering, in the pools winner's final, he self-destructed trying to pull off an edgeguard with Spinning Mixer when he just barely missed the ledge. He could become a monster in Smash with his parkour skills, but he's going to have to learn the ropes first."

"And while I'm at it, Walhart was a self-proclaimed Smash villain when he started a year ago, and still is, and in my opinion he's pretty good at it. He has power, and revels in the power, but doesn't pull any dick moves. He's at his happiest when he has an all-out fight, and will urge unworthy fighters to not come back until they stand a chance. Much like Ganondorf as of late."

Walhart waited for the signal to start the fight, balancing the weight of his axe between his two hands while Rashid stretched his arms. Then the game started. Rashid started walking forward while throwing out punches every so often. Once Rashid reached midrange, he threw out Yssar to control some ground space, and started to kick up some whirlwind shots to keep Walhart out of the air. Walhart cut through the whirlwind wall, threatening Rashid on the other side. 

Rashid, however, wasn't entirely unprepared for the situation, and decided to cross him up with a brief horizontal Spinning Mixer. Walhart widthstood all of the hits, but when he turned around to face Rashid, Rashid was a short distance in front of Walhart, and dashed up to grab him. A knee, and Rashid kicked him back, an impact that Walhart teched with a forward roll, letting him escape further hits from Rashid. 

===

At four in the afternoon, Jake, done watching the livestream of Walhart bodying other fighters with some difficulty, finally got around to checking the memo that Palutena had sent the programming and engineering interns yesterday. There was a video attached, which Jake opened up after wiring some headphones to his laptop. 

"It's Palutena. Master Hand told me that I missed something on the first day. Don't worry; it won't take long. 

I'm not lying when I say you have incredible power at your fingertips. Depending on what you signed up for, you might have access to source code to the Smash system, be able to turn on and off units, make ROB do whatever you want, or something else that you need to do for your internship. And someone that wants in Smash Corp. without permission will want that power. How will they get that power? Brute-force passwords? Probe the firewall for software that is vulnerable to buffer overflows? Ask nicely for your password? 

The last one actually works. You'll be off work, and receive an e-mail that says it's from me. And it says I need your password for good reason. Of course, I don't need your password when I already have authority in the Smash Corp. network and an all-seeing eye, but there are some of you that might give your password to the sender anyway. This is the essence of phishing: asking nicely for sensitive information under a front story.

It's one thing for scammers to e-mail random people hoping for information, and it sometimes works. But phishers are cleverer, and will often personalize their messages to make them look like it's legit. This is known as spear phishing. Smash Corp won't be asking any of you for your passwords or any other sort of account, no matter what the situation is. If on the off chance someone needs it, I can deliver the information to those who need it far faster and more reliably than you ever could."

Okay, a PSA about phishing. Palutena delivering it made it somewhat pleasant to watch, but Jake's mind still managed to tune out half the words. 

"…to make sure that nobody creates shish-kebabs of our security system by giving out their password, I'll be sending out e-mails from various temporary domains in the form of common forms of phishing e-mails. Phishing is serious business, and though it would be funny if it was my personal decision to send these fake e-mails, this is my professional decision, and any humor that might be derived from successful e-mails will be dark. For all of our sakes, don't reply to them, or any e-mail asking for your credentials."

Jake got back to the stream. That message was kinda uneventful. Mostly phishing stuff he already knew about, but delivered by a goddess. On the stream, Walhart had finished a run in the loser's round of pools and was facing off against Rashid again in the pools Grand Finals. 

===

"Em Palutena, want to join me in some matches in the Simulators?" 

Palutena was right by the kitchen, watching her angel Pit alongside commentary trying to understand how well Pit was using his bow/swords/pole-arm on a floating screen. She faced Alec with some interest. 

"What kind of match? Serious, one on one? 8-player free-for-alls with items on the temple stage? What are you interested in?"

Alec was quick to reply. "Erm, one V one matches, no items, fox-- I mean on the neutrals. Much like in tournaments."

"I'll try to clear some space for some matches tomorrow. Would be interested in seeing what you fight like. What time should we fight?"

Crap. Palutena wasn't going to be occupied fighting for the time needed for Robin to set up his whatever it was. Alec then took a moment to try to read Palutena's mind to try to determine what times to ask for. But Palutena wasn't cooperating with the mind-reading, so Alec had to ask. 

"Hmmm. Would 6 PM work?"

Palutena's mouth arced up slightly. 

"Hmhmhm. I'm actually busy at six. Maybe another time?"

Guessing games. Argh. Usually Alec would be using his psychic abilities to get around these games, but Palutena wasn't letting it work. So to guessing. 

"Seven?"

Palutena shook her head slightly. 

"Eight?"

That wasn't it, by what Alec could tell of Palutena's expression. 

"Nine?"

Nope. No change in response. 

"Ergh. Argh I give up. Just tell me a time that works for you."

"No worries. I can clear three PM to five PM. How does that sound?"

"Fine. It'll work."

Alec then promptly left the table to tell Robin that he wasn't able to get Palutena occupied at the time, and that he would have to postpone the setup until tomorrow, 3 PM to 5 PM. And then there was also the matter of ordering a pizza to split with Ness on Friday for lunch, at least he hoped.

===

Julia sat at a table, eating a Caesar salad with Stacy, who was eating the same thing, but saturated in dressing and with loads of bacon bits. 

"Stacy, drenching your salad in dressing and bacon bits completely defeats the purpose of eating a salad." 

"It might defeat the nutrition, but the dressing tastes great, and everything goes with bacon."

"So why put it on leaves in the first place?"

"… oh."

A girl walked up to them and sat down.

"Celia, I just wanted to let you know what we can be friends, even if I tried to rat you out in Mafia."

"Its fine now. To be fair, I was thinking much the same thing, that the speed you took up my offer was indicative that you might be mafia. I almost thought that had happened when your partner in crime came in and declared you mafia." 

While the two talked, Stacy leaned back and asked a nearby striped-shirt villager, "When's the next Mafia game?"

The villager shrugged her shoulders, and kept going her merry way. Stacy leaned back to try to get a clearer answer, and farther back, until the chair tipped over and Stacy found her back parallel to the ground. Everyone was looking at the source of a recent noise, her. 

"There's nothing to see here. Just a girl who leaned too far back in her chair."

===

Falco got back to his room, having decided to focus on getting everything ready for the day when he and Fox would come together to collect their bounty. Getting premission to be absent from Master Hand, done. Making Slippy's voice less annoying in communications equipment, check. Now what? 

He decided he'd need to arrange for Ellen to learn something when he would be gone. Damn girl was an annoyance to teach, and seemingly obvious things such as not throwing out unsafe options in neutral kept going over her head. He, of all fighters, could spotdodge her usual rifle shots on reaction, and run up to her and punish her in endlag. That's how bad she was. It was his choice to teach her, though, and he'd rather make her reasonably competent at fighting than give up. 

Also, he hadn't piloted his Arwing in a while, so he would hit the simulators, if only to verify that he was still in peak flying condition. And while he got that done, he'd catch up on practicing with the other arwing forms he had neglected to practice. Flying around in the arwing was a feeling that he couldn't replicate elsewhere, but there wouldn't always be free space to fly around in. 

Last, he still hadn't caught up with all the messages Katt and the other members of Free as a Bird kept sending him. So he checked them. Most of them kept asking when they could drop a communication line with him, were e-mails that were sent to all the Hot Rodders, or were asking him the same old question of when they could meet with him again. 

Falco took advantage of his privileged position on the Hot Rodders mailing list to send an invite to a group chat to all of them. After fifteen minutes, Katt, Kool, Bowsor, and Mouser were all in the participant list, and Falco could get all their questions done. 

"Falco, when can we meet you again?"

He was just holding a hope that that exact wording wouldn't be used for that question. Well, there went that hope. 

"If you're that enthusiastic, I'll be out with the rest of the Star Fox team to claim a bounty somewhere around the Smash Mansion on July 5th. Our current plans are to leave to make it to the Great Fox on the night before, and you might be able to catch me there."

"I'll see you there." That was Katt. Falco was also hoping that Katt wouldn't tail him closely. But whatever. Fox might find allies useful. 

===

Sully was sparring against an imaginary knight on her bed, imagining that she was hitting first with a broomstick which she used as an improvised lance in this imaginary battle. She sounded her usual finishing cry of "To hell with you!"

In an adjacent room, Lissa cried, "Woah! Sully! You scared me out of my sleep here! Mind finding somewhere else to practice your fighting?"

"Dammit, this isn't the barracks. I will."

By habit, Sully opened the door across from her. It was locked. Then she tried the next door. Also locked. And then the next. It was a closet, too small to do any sort of pretend fighting in. And the next. This door gave, and there was plenty of space. However, it was occupied by two boys arguing about an empty can of soda, neither of which noticed Sully, and by furniture which indicated both of them were living there. She quickly and quietly closed the door behind her.

"Crap. Chrom told me about all the interns, but I didn't think they would be everywhere."


	12. Thursday, June 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright. Seven freaking weeks since I last updated this story. I couldn't stand letting large plot holes stand for such a long time, so I patched them up two chapters early. I almost certainly missed some, though. 
> 
> Dark Pit? Phosphora? I thought you two might interject. Hello? Do you two have any opinions?

At breakfast, Tharja proceeded down the hall to breakfast. It was a straightforward eating of sausages and over-medium eggs, or it would be if that guy didn't keep looking at her. Tharja gave him the best death stare she could muster. He looked away sheepishly. 

Then she got back eating, starting by gulping down a sausage down by its length. Soon, she noticed another pair of eyes looking into her chest. She repositioned herself to take that out of their line of sight. That didn't help much, so she turned more and more, but that only ended up with that pair of eyes pointed at her ass instead. Aware of the line of sight, Tharja kept turning gradually, eventually facing the exact same direction as when she started noticing his gaze, before figuring that the gaze would continue no matter which direction she was pointing. 

Then Sylvester decided to take a seat across from her and try to strike up conversation. Before he could muster words, another person mentioned how he wanted to see Tharja's "spell-books", and his table mate replied in affirmation. This was the time Tharja decided that this was enough, and she decided to take her tray, now exclusively of eggs, to her room. Sylvester stopped chewing, then started piling egg yolk into his face, dismayed at his lost chance to introduce himself to the sexy mage. 

===

Upstairs, Tharja grabbed a foldable chair and pulled up to Stahl, who was eating a fruit salad made from the free fruit provided in the kitchen, bottled water, and sugar from the packets by the coffee dispensers. 

"Um, who is it? Er, right. Tharja."

"I'm staying here for the rest of the morning. The attention I got in the dining hall, it's like it's full of vultures."

"No problem. You want some of this fruit salad? I made too much of it for me to eat."

===

When William got back to his room, he pulled several bedsheets off of his bed and gathered a pillow to put into the laundry. On the center of the pillow was a large reddish-brown bloodstain, and his sheets had translucent white stains on them. William wrapped the blanket around the pillow to hide these stains before making it down to the laundry room downstairs. 

William and Sylvester made it down to the laundry room at the same time. William wasn't exactly mobile or well-balanced with a giant roll of sheets in his hand, but Sylvester brought a comforter and several pillows into his clump of bedding, making him even worse balanced, and preventing him from seeing in front of himself. 

Naturally, they bumped into each other. Sylvester managed to force himself into the door after a few tries and a hand to remove a snag from the lock in the door. William thought Sylvester was going to fall over, so he stepped back. Sylvester then stumbled forward, and William took a step back. From there, they lost their footing, and kept stumbling until Sylvester and William filled up the corner with their laundry. 

When they landed, William against the wall, and Sylvester between their respective sheets, they saw something in the corner of their eyes. Out of the corner tumbled two pillows. They were both white, they both had bloodstains in the center of them, and they landed with their stains up. 

William and Sylvester looked at each other. First, they looked at each other with bewilderment. Then after their minds collected and they realized what the other saw, they expressed embarrasment. Then, after what felt like a whole half a minute, they relaxed, and tacitly came to an acknowledgement that this incident was theirs, and would stay between them. The whole thing actually took just ten seconds. 

Peach then walked into the laundry room with her load of underwear and some machine-washable dresses. The two boys were still piled up against the wall. 

"Heheh. You two need help?" she asked. 

"No," Sylvester replied, quickly collecting his pillow and trying to find a machine to stuff his laundry in. 

"No," William said, as he grabbed his pillow and wrapped it around his sheets. 

===

Rashid made his way to a quiet, clean corner of a room. His next match would start soon, so this would have to do. Azam emptied a giant five-gallon bottle full of tap water into a bin, then went off to get his own. Rashid immediately dunked his head into the water before catching himself and reminding himself that this ritual should be done consciously and deliberately. 

Once both Rashid and Azam finished washing themselves, Rashid pointed himself at the corner and started praying. Azam, however, noticed that Rashid wasn't pointed in any particular direction. 

"Isn't Salat supposed to be done towards Mecca?"

"…So which way IS Mecca?"

"Doesn't your phone have a GPS system on it?"

Rashid then pulled out his phone and got his location on a map app. He was somewhere in Smashville, Amerijapanadaropesiafrica. Zooming out, Rashid found a different world, but Mecca was nowhere to be found on the map. Rashid shrugged his shoulders before showing Azam his phone. 

"There is no Qibla here?"

"I thought you'd be the one to tell me that."

"I thought you, Young Master, with your GPS and planning, would be the one to tell me."

"Oh well. Now can I have my phone back? I need to look up what to do when I miss something in Salat."

===

Robin got to work on the last distraction for his plan, as Pit would otherwise be in his room. He decided that he would write Pit's name on an object, and then have one of his accomplices deliver it to the front, ostensibly so that Pit would be called up to get it. But what object should he write it on? He would need to clean up afterward, and if it was an embarrassing object, the effects of this prank would far outlast the prank itself. 

Given the above factor, Robin immediately eliminated underwear from the list of things he might do this on. A replica of Pit's tunic might work, but he had no such thing. Pencils and pens would be rather obviously fake; Pit just took whatever was available and didn't have his own. A notebook… actually, Robin thought, that might work. He immediately ran out to buy an empty notebook, then wrote Pit's name on the inside cover and shook it up to make it look older. 

He then called up Blaise to deliver the notebook to the front office and declare it lost. 

===

Walhart met up with Rashid at a table below a tent in the middle of Knockout. Their last match together was in the second round of pools, grand finals, where Walhart forced a bracket reset, but Rashid reclaimed the upper bracket by decisively winning the last three games. There was one more round of pools to go until the main bracket would proceed, and both of them would have to fight through their respective, heavily stacked pools, to make it there. 

"Rashid, you may be new, but I respect you for the challenge you provide. I wish you luck against your opponents."

"Thanks. You're a good fighter yourself. But what's with the 'I shall conquer' thing you do? Are you always like that?"

Walhart's face slightly soured as he bit a dressing-covered cherry tomato, but was quick to reply after he sent it to the stomach for an acid bath. 

"I am a conqueror in heart and in body, and Smash is the new land I claim my stake in. But really, having a character is part of the fun, and being a conqueror fits me perfectly."

"Hey, maybe I should do something like that." 

Rashid then stood on his chair and started proclaiming, "I am Rashid, of the turbulent wind! I… uh… erm… I need to think this through."

Then he sat back down, but stood back up after a few seconds. "I am Rashid, of the… the…"

Walhart sat Rashid back down, and firmly held a hand on his shoulder to keep him there. 

"You already do well as a middle-eastern explorer from Street Fighter that wants to spread his name. There is no need to over-complicate your character."

Azam then reminded Rashid that it was almost two. 

"Thanks. Now I've got a match against Canines Bruce now. See ya later!"

Rashid then ran out, depriving Walhart of a chance to reply back. A brief look at the current brackets showed that Rashid was indeed up against K9sbruce, sponsored by ASCII art of boobs. And Walhart shared his final pool with Nairo, who also got sent to Losers in an upset and was set to go against him in a Loser's Semifinals bracket if they both made it there. Well, there went his chances of making it out of Pools alive. 

===

Thanks to some suggestions from Robin about whom to tell, word quickly reached Pit that the notebook labeled Pit had made it into Lost and Found. However, because Blaise went through Peach to spread word of the "missing" notebook, both the smasher Pit and the intern Pit heard of it. 

Palutena knew that the notebook probably wasn't Pit's, and could have known that it was part of Robin's plan if she bothered to look into the details with her all-seeing eye. Instead, she decided to play along, as was her nature. So she told Pit, her beloved angel, about the notebook. Pit didn't remember not having a notebook, so he was easily convinced that this was something worth his attention. 

===

Intern Pit, on the other hand, wasn't directly told, but caught wind of the supposedly missing notebook in the dining hall. He was downstairs, just recently off from a bit of extra fitness training, and participating in the latest conversations downstairs. And he heard his own name. And then he heard about a notebook with his name in the lost and found. Out of curiosity, he went around to the Lost and Found and found an angel investigating the pile of odds and ends. 

"… Hello. You're Pit, right?"

"I sure am! What's your name?"

"I'm also Pit."

"Cool. I don't recall having anything of this sort. Is this yours?"

"I don't remember having this notebook either. But maybe there's something in here?"

Both Pits flipped through the notebook, with the angel helping to prop it open and the intern moving the pages. It was completely empty, save for the name on the inside cover. They've been had. Pit assumed that Palutena was the one that fooled him, and simply shrugged it off. 

===

Blaise peered over the corner of the lost-and-found. Pit the angel was there, conversing with an intern. Robin's plans were going as planned out, plus or minus a few details that couldn't be anticipated by any tactician. In any case, Robin could proceed ahead with whatever he was going to do in that room. She wasn't told what that was. 

===

With both Alec and Palutena on the ground of the simulator on Final Destination, the voice of Master Hand resonated through the chamber, counting down to the start of the match. The two competitors prepared their neutral options, then released them right when the match started. 

"Autoreticle!"

"PK FIRE!"

The PK Fire hit clanked with the first autoreticle projectile, allowing the other two autoreticle shots to hit Alec. This forced flinching from Alec, freeing him to throw out a quick kick. Palutena stood just beyond his attack range, and started walking and hopping back and forth to gauge Alec's reactions to different actions. 

Alec watched as Palutena stood at range, and ran up to hit her with some psychic blasts, leading to a combo of neutral airs, then a finisher of forward air, which left both Alec and Palutena on the right side. Alec then quickly summoned a PK thunder and sent himself hurtling toward the ledge. Alec got up onto the stage, then tried to catch Palutena on the two-frame by deploying telekinetic blasts on either side of him. Both missed. 

Alec managed to catch Palutena's getup roll, but mistakenly deployed PSI Magnet as a punish rather than PK Flash, leaving him open for a three-hit combo from Palutena. A read let Palutena get another up air hit before Alec made it back to the ground with the help of a carefully-landed back air, sending Palutena tumbling to the other side of the stage. 

Palutena continued to hop around, maintaining distance from Alec's short-ranged attacks, and then suddenly faded in and hit with a Forward Air, launching Alec again offstage. Palutena then sealed the stock by hitting Alec's PK thunder, leaving Alec helpless to fall to the bottom blast zone. 

Off the respawn platform, Alec then ran in for a grab, which led to a PK Fire down throw, then two neutral airs, the second which Palutena SDIed out of. Palutena then held her shield as Alec tried to jab her guard down before being grabbed, then flung downwards for a neutral air. 

===

Pit, Dark Pit, and intern Pit were arguing outside the door to Palutena's room. In the hallway, Dark Pit had a raised voice.

"Pittoo, you and Pitstain were the ones that dragged me into this! You do it!"

Then Pit replied on the other Pit's behalf. 

"You're not getting Pittree's point here, Pittoo. He's just curious and wants to know more about us."

Palutena, done with her matches, noticed the intern right next to her two beloved angels. 

"Who do we have here? Another intern?"

"Yeah. His name is also Pit. Who invited him?"

"I did. You already forgot when you saw us two in the lost and found?"

"Pitstain, that was a rhetorical question. I already knew the answer."

Palutena ended that line of argument right there with her words. 

"I want to hear from Pitthree himself. How did you end up with the angels?"

Dark Pit lowered his sight and breathed heavily, presumably since he wanted to shed his "Pittoo" nickname on the intern. 

Intern Pit cleared his throat, then stood for a good fifteen seconds recalling the events of the past hour. Then he talked. 

"So I heard that someone named Pit, which I thought was me, lost something and it was in the lost and found, so I went there. And Pit was there too. Pit quickly introduced himself, and we made fast friends. 

The notebook that we went looking for in the lost and found? We found it, and initially, we thought it was the other's, but we quickly figured out that it didn't belong to either of us. And that's where Pitfall found us."

Dark Pit smiled a bit. At least someone was giving his edge some respect. 

"He asked us what we were doing, then told us that Palutena fooled us again if we were looking here for a notebook. That's exactly what we were doing, and we couldn't exactly dispute his conclusion, knowing you and all. 

So we then messed around for a while, got to know each other a little better, and then Pit wanted to return to his room. So here we are."

Palutena smiled. "I'm more than happy to oblige. You go first, Pit."

Palutena then summoned a keycard into her hand and opened the door to their room. The sound of glass breaking was heard by all four of them. Pit peered inside, then asked, "What happened here? Doesn't look like anything's broken."

The intern looked inside. His expectation was of a magical and ornate nature, perhaps bigger on the inside than on the outside. Instead, it was simple, capturing the essence of Palutena's Skyworld palace inside the studio-sized room. The dresser shared the back wall with Pit's fold-down bed, its mirrored surface only interrupted by two brass-lined recesses serving as handles. On top of a patterned white and grey table in the middle of the room were three black plastic pillars providing power outlets and USB ports to an array of devices. And on the left wall, by Palutena's white bed, was a feed of the view from Skyworld. 

Nothing out of the ordinary was happening, so Pit went inside and set himself down. But when Pit reached to turn on the fan, the exact same sound of broken glass sounded again. 

"What happened?" Lady Palutena asked. 

Pit looked confusedly at the fan and his own hands. Nothing was broken. Then he reached for the fan again. The broken glass sound played again. 

Palutena then reached for the fan to verify her hunch. Yes, there was something in the room that caused the sound of glass breaking to be played when certain events happened. 

"This was actually pretty good, Robin. You fooled me for a moment. But I'll have something even better for you later."

The four then started looking around the room to determine exactly what Robin did to the room. Palutena searched under the furniture, Pit climbed the walls to see if anything was on the walls or ceiling, Dark Pit didn't care, and intern Pit was too busy marveling the room's design to be useful. 

==

Robin ate an impromptu mix of ham, cheese, and lettuce in a bowl, studying match results. Since the beginning of Smash 4, Master Hand (or someone else in charge of balancing-- he often delegated tasks to others) would keep track of matchups with the help of the regular exhibition matches like the one that ended yesterday, and direct the modification of the Smash engine to make sure that no one fighting style was too powerful. Cloud won this tournament, and if current patterns held up, the next patch would be to make super-strong weapon-wielders not as fast. 

He sent a message to his co-conspirators in pranks, Alec, Blaise, and Griflet, asking them how they felt about it all. 

Griflet was the first to respond. 

"I dunno. This prank-setting is fun, but with Dedede trying to teach me the ways of hammer clobbering, I'm finding the internship experience as a whole to be rather silly for my own good."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you that can't spend hours studying each day:
> 
>   * For those of you that missed the joke in the laundry scene, think nosebleeds. In particular, anime nosebleeds. 
>   * I honesly have no idea which direction Muslims ought to pray in an alternate universe with no equivalent to Mecca, but the precedent I was able to pick up by studying Wikipedia is that if, and only if, there is no Qibla or it is not locatable, any direction is fine.
> 



	13. Friday, June 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I must admit, when I hacked out my first words, I didn't forsee myself being here months later, hacking out the story at what feels like a glacial pace. Maybe I'll get to the end, maybe I won't. But in either case, I'm here a while, and I may as well get the most of what I've been doing. Argh. I need a quick break before I continue. 
> 
> And there's a section dedicated to the great PrincessAmerica. It should be easy to spot it. The same trigger warnings apply, too: the narrator of that section is a complete far-right idiot, and she spouts bigotry and rape references at almost the same rate she does in the series she comes from. 
> 
> Well, time to go to sleep for now. 
> 
> "I hope you're okay, Eagl. Um, Eagl? Are you awake?"

As the clock ticked twelve at midnight, Griflet suddenly woke up with a realization. Robin hadn't reported back on how he was going to make good of his promise to make up for the book theft. He nabbed his tablet phone, and replied back to the text message that Robin sent him. 

"Figured out how to return the book to Tharja? You promised me on Tuesday, remember? It's keeping me up right now.

\--Gft"

Sent. But the thought was still gnawing in the back of his head, so he stayed up in the event that Robin replied promptly. Then they might have a chat. 

Thirty minutes passed. The back of the tablet started getting warm as Griflet read more news about how some people had started cracking the current iteration of Smash open and inserting their own changes. Different proofs of concepts by different people included shield-cancellable everything, turbo mode mods, momentum-changing airdodges, and much faster falling speeds. It was all amazing, what people could do with some ingenuity and some limited tools. 

Robin didn't reply back. Griflet's eyes struggled to stay open, and as the thought of the tome faded from his mind, he fell asleep. 

===

Fresh out of bed, Ricken changed into a fresh tunic from his bag, and opened up his notebook to note down how he felt. Puberty was a thing, and though his family stood short, Ricken had willingly been subjected to an experimental growth hex, which, in theory, should let Ricken grow another half a meter over the course of adolescence without side effects. Whether it actually worked in practice, and whether it was safe, well, that was what was experimental about the hex. 

He was a bit tired, but that was from staying up until twelve to understand Stokes' theorem and how it related to wind magic. And it wasn't nothing that a bit of activity and a cup of warm tea couldn't fix. A pen clicked, and Ricken noted down everything that his highly instrumented smart watch couldn't catch. 

"Day 113. No dreams as I woke up. Bed feels soft, slightly above room temperature, and dry. No feelings of pain, weakness, fatigue, numbness, or imbalance. Room is slightly, but not uncomfortably, cool, and doesn't feel dry or humid. Energy is typical." 

Ricken thought, was that all? Did he remember all the relevant subjective feelings? His neutral-feeling body wasn't helping this matter at all. Then he figured, if it comes up, I'll remember it. A scale indicated that his mass was 52.2 kg, and finagling with a tape measure showed his height of 180 centimeters. 

After brushing his teeth and almost cutting his lip with a razor blade, Ricken straightened out his hair with a normal comb, and walked carefully down the stairs to the dining hall. A jigglypuff was there to greet him. 

===

To one side of the Dining Hall, Walhart stood at a table in his armor, eating from a box of cheerios. A dispenser of various juices was available right by him, but Walhart wasn't feeling thirsty yet. 

"Eeey G'morning Walhart!"

As Walhart chewed a bunch of Os down, he acknowledged the friendly greeting by making eye contact with the girl and waving his cheerios-filled hand. 

"Hey, how'd your Knockout run go?"

"I drowned in the final round of pools. My prowess is great, but Nairo was able to match it and defeat me. I'll seek my vengeance in Doubles."

That Nairo. The one who wore tight-gripping hover shoes given to him by a sponsor, kicked up combos and mix-ups like Samus, and was considered second in the world before the tumultuous summer. He had started to fall down the leaderboards since the rework of propulsion mechanics, but he was still a potent Smash 4 fighter. 

Then the girl cuddled up against him and held out a phone. 

"What are you doing?"

"You aren't familiar with this? Should I introduce you to it?"

"No thanks, I know what Snapchat is, but why the disappearing picture service?"

"It's more valuable if it can't be kept. Smile!"

As much as he didn't like the disappearing messages that were characteristic of Snapchat, he couldn't argue with her intuitive idea of value. Before Walhart could think of anything else, a fake camera shutter sounded, and a Snapchat lens chibified them both on the girl's phone. 

"You're… you're going to send that to your friends?"

"It'll be fine. The pictures disappear, remember?"

And with this, the girl scrawled on the message, "193rd isn't so bad. --Irene" before sending it to her friends. 

"Thank you for your support. Perhaps next time I'll capture a higher place."

"Wally, please promise me you'll relax. You're all wound up, and it's hurting your success. And when you're back at Knockout, say hello to your biggest fan fo' me please."

"You don't consider yourself your biggest fan?"

Walhart looked over at Irene. She was fairly tall, but slightly shorter than Walhart. How big would the bigger fan be?

"Nope. I know someone even bigger. And you'll know who I'm talking about when ya see him!"

===

Patrick was strapped up in a set of blunt claws. Mumkhar's idea for this one was that maybe blunt force would be better for securing knockouts than mere damage dealing. So far, it was working, as the sandbag was being consistently knocked out by uppercuts around 90%. All of the attacks were high-knockback, however, so, Patrick thought and noted, it might be harder to actually confirm a kill with these blunt claws. 

A faint blue glow briefly showed itself on the white exterior of the simulator before Lucina appeared. 

"Patrick, it's good to see that you're already training on your own."

"Thanks, Lucina."

Patrick was going to say more, but his words were stuckin his throat. He knew very well what he wanted to say, though. Lucina, with her odd fashion sense fashion sense, had donned a translucent, lacy white shirt, through which Patrick could see that there was nothing behind it, and a pair of tight navy-colored leggings. 

As soon as Suzie appeared next to Lucina, Patrick ran right up to her. He whispered into her ear. 

"Can you tell Lucina to change into something else?"

"Why?"

"Well… well… you don't see her clothes? Don't tell me you see that as normal."

"I meant, why do you want me to tell her? Why not do it yourself?" 

"Well, how in the world DO I tell her?"

"Patrick, just tell her. I'm sure she'll understand if you mess up."

"You do it."

"The final answer is no, you do it yourself if you need it to happen so urgently."

Alright, fine, he was going to do it. Patrick took a good, deep breath, let it out over four seconds, and walked over to Lucina, steeling himself for whatever Lucina's reaction was going to be. 

"Lucina, I, uh, I think I'm be more comfortable if you dressed into something else."

Lucina sheathed her sword and set her attention on Patrick. 

"Patrick, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Can you explain?"

"Well, look around at everyone else."

Unfortunately, the surroundings weren't exactly conductive towards what he was going to say. Shulk was swimming around in his memetic swimming trunks, Samus was pulling elastic cords in her Zero Suit, and Palutena was passing by in her high-slitted dress. Not to mention the girls in sports bras and short shorts, and boys that opted to not wear shirts at all. 

"What do you want me to see?"

"Ah, never mind that thought. What I mean is that… it… your clothes… err… don't fit our conditions. You know, you guiding us through stuff in a gym."

"Pardon?"

"As in, well, erm… "

Patrick looked straight at Suzie with desperation, which Suzie was able to pick up quickly enough. Patrick instinctively stepped back, giving Suzie the space needed to be at a comfortable conversing distance to Lucina. Once Suzie was engaged with Lucina, Patrick let the two make their way out of the training room while he tried his combos against an evasive CPU in the simulator. 

Patrick looked for kill confirms with the blunt claws. Up throw only led to the potential for juggles, with no associated mix-ups or confirms, only killing around 150%. Down throw was a combo throw until mid-percents, but after that, it just led to juggles. Thankfully, stray aerials could kill the sandbag at just 130% near center stage, and the claws gave enough range that spacing them made them safe on shield. And that was what he could find before Suzie came back. 

"Hey Suzie… where's Lucina?"

"She's changing. I explained to her why a translucent shirt and leggings don't fit in a gym. Is that what you wanted me to say?"

"Yeah, um, yeah. Precisely."

Ten minutes later, Lucina came back. She was wearing basically the same thing, but she had a green sports bra under her shirt and a white pair of shorts over her leggings. Seeing Lucina's modified outfit, Patrick lowered his head and went back to the simulators, trying to consistently reverse aerial rush short hop some claw strikes. 

===

Celia stared at the glob of C++ code in front of her face. She knew it was wrong, since she was briefed that this part of the code would sometimes cause swords to have hurtboxes, but because the Smash programmers of old neglected to keep it readable, it was nearly impenetrable. Time to whip out the linter and refactorer. 

A quick runover with the linter showed that most of it depended on undefined behaviors and the code was full of bad practices such as copypasted code, tangles of gotos, and direct manipulation of bits within objects. A comment said that the current state of the code was from a quick-and-dirty conversion from an old C file in 2007, during the Brawl days, and was intended to be an interim solution. Celia let out a small sigh, then started by trying to determine the control flow of the code with a debugger. 

She painstakingly untangled the program one step at a time, taking full advantage of the associated unit tests to make sure she didn't accidentally break anything in the process. 

===

Right outside the mansion, Walhart held a giant bag with his body armor and weapon, and had a cowboy hat to block out the sun. Following him was Ricken, apparently distracted. 

"What is holding you up? I thought we were going to battle together right now."

In the Smash mansion, Ricken had a Pikachu clinging to its robe. He told it that it should go back to Red, then patted its head. Though it didn't want to hurt Ricken, a large charge difference had developed as it clung to Ricken's robe, and Ricken took a nasty electric shock when he touched the pikachu's head. 

Some more gentle pulling managed to get the pikachu off Ricken's robe, but not before Ricken's arms took more shocks. With Ricken's arms out of commission, his grip loosened, and Pikachu dropped onto the floor. 

"Pika… "

"Got to go, little guy. Your master is probably waiting for you."

Ricken took a look at the Pikachu's tail. Yes, it was that of a male. He then swept a bit of yellow fur off of his robe before running to Walhart, but the fur clung on anyway. 

"I'm coming! Hold on!"

It was a brief walk to the center of Knockout, where the doubles matches were getting started. Looking out at the crowd, Ricken saw that no one recognised Walhart. 

"I thought you told me that you were reasonably well known around this area."

"Walhart is reasonably well known. But right now, to them, I am just another man. It is the armor that makes Walhart in the public eye."

"So that means they'll recognise you as soon as you're in your armor?"

"Yes. Now, go find a place to sit so it doesn't look like you made a new friend."

Ricken found a table a few rows down from the center, while Walhart went to a temporary room to change. A concession stand offered prepared instant noodles, which Ricken quickly bought and ate. 

Back from the changing rooms, Walhart was quickly met by an enthusiastic twelve-year old boy. From his looks, he was a year or so into puberty, and had a frame to match. 

"Walhart! My sister Irene told me you were here, so I'm here too!" 

"Your sister is correct, and I am Walhart. What is your name?"

"Jake. Nice to meet you, Walhart. I have a big gift for you. Do you want it?"

"Show me, and I may accept it."

Jake ran off, and soon returned with a giant paper fan of his making. And then Walhart realized what Irene meant, accepting the fan and putting it under Ricken's watch. Walhart signed his autograph on Jake's arm when Rashid spotted him and waved him over. 

"I'm looking for a doubles partner. Care to join me, Walhart?"

"I already have a partner for doubles. But perhaps we can join for triples."

===

Robin checked his text messages, munching on the croutons left over from lunch that day. There was a message sent today morning. Huh. Robin tapped it, not knowing who "Gft" was, but as soon as he read the contents of the message, he realized who sent it. Griflet. And he was still distressed about the whole Tharja tome thing. 

He still had the unused original tome. Good. Now how was he supposed to return it to Tharja without letting her get a clue about how it was stolen? A plan started forming in his head. 

He'd need to call back his helpers, first of all. Then he'd send one of them to Tharja, and have them claim that they found it. This was where he was before a knock sounded on the door. Robin knew who was there, and opened the door for a blue-haired mess with a ponytail. 

===

I would normally turn the first-person responses into third-person accounts, but this was so ridiculously bad I had to share it with only minimal processing. Behold this wingnut idiocy:

Fter gunner guy wit duck n dog preyedwith me, I askd him a queston. 

"R u sade? Or ar there rapping lesbans n gays arond her?"

"I m safe. Therr no rappin gyas or lesbans arond her."

I cane her 2 spread Jesus word n help gais n lesbans becom strate. Now I no not all gays r frum rap. Some r born liek me. But LESBANISM IS STILL A SIN, so I tri 2 help otters avoid it, and prey to GOD (not god like hethens n athists rite it) dayly 2 help me becum strate. 

On my fone I go to bretibarr.con but googel come up insted so it can force me 2 see librul sites. I click the lijk to Britbart, and go reed articles fron ny favrit riter, Mlio Yonopolist. He is gay, but wants 2 be strate an knows teh truth about the world. Hee xposed 999antia SarkastinPPP 4 te librul athist wsj she us, nd is introducng Doneld Drumpf 2 the us. 

At diner, I sat down with Ellen, another christen gun owner. She has a hurting rifel instead of ny dads shitgun, but she is in te nra 2. I met her at hte shooting area n she shot a bullsaye, so I ask her ware she lerned to shoot. She teld me she learnd from here parents. She also teld me about how her paretns were good christen paents, so we becam friends quickly. 

"Hi Sara. Di u wont to jon me aty knockot n wach matches/" she eks. 

"Sure; I sed. I culdnt be rapped by lesbans becus im already lesban, but elen might becum one. Ther arre libruls such as Kween Lazarbath an Leffin and Niles n hilarity clinten, and any of tem mite be at kockout converting morr pepole to ther side. 

Ellen then gave sum salt subsitute to a large amored guy for whatevar reesen. He excepted it, and a little boy took sum an put it on hsi fud. Wen I askd bout it, Ellen repled it wus tradisian. 

===

As the time was nearing ten, Celia was in a computer room, almost done detangling the code. She was also nodding off. This should be done any second. And… almost, just needed to check that everything was fine. After two minutes worth of unit tests, a good result came out of it, and Celia immediately committed it, running two of her fingers over the keyboard for the commit message. 

Palutena then came out of the corner of her eye, and kneeled about two meters from her. Celia turned her head to face her.

"Celia, I appreciate your devotion to your work, but remember to take breaks too, okay?"

Celia propped her head on her hand, and used her pinky to prop her right eyelid open. 

"Palutena, I'm fine."

"I'm sure you feel fine, but get some sleep right now. A bit of sleep improves productivity quite a bit."

"Yes, maam."

Palutena leaned her head back, and looked almost startled. 

"Excuse me?"

"Is something the matter?"

"Yes, and that matter is you called me 'maam'. Please don't."

"Understood, maam. I mean maa-- ma-- m-- muh-- mi-- miss."

===

The other Robin, as in the female one, took a pair of binoculars, and started noting down things. Palutena was standing in a computer room, waiting for the Cute Toot House ensemble to come in. First came Red (and presumably his pokemon), then Zelda, disguised as Tetra, and then Pit, and then Riki. Sonic was usually there, but Palutena decided the meeting could go on without him. 

Robin then took out her own phone, took out its built-in stylus, and jotted down notes. She was lost on the part where Red was supposed to go out and catch some unknown pokemon, so that didn't make it in, but everything else was faithfully transcribed. She still didn't know what the end result was, though, since that unknown pokemon was key to the operation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who don't have a good vantage point to observe from:
> 
>   * Stokes' Law is a Calculus theorem that has applications in physics, especially where fields are involved. I'd explain it here, but there's no straightforward way to describe it. 
>   * Ricken's log consists of indicators, that, if abnormal, may be indicative of an endocrine disorder.
>   * A linter, named after one of the first of its kind, Lint, is a program that analyzes code for bad practices such as those described.
>   * Refactoring is the process of reworking a program so that its form is different but it functions the same way. Automated tools known as refactorers have been created for this process. 
>   * In my headcanon, Sara doesn't stay the way she is in the end of the third Supper Smash Bros Mishonh from God entry. Sara's parents are still homophobic, and would be doubly dismayed to see that video games were involved with her coming out. And Sara still probably holds conservative values to heart. So it'd be very hard for Sara to maintain her change. The only difference is she knows she's a lesbian. Her new hero in this continuity is Milo Yiannopolus, who is an alt-right figurehead that is also homosexual and wishes to be straight. I'm done explaining this section, because otherwise my head is going to collapse in reactionary memes without warning.
> 



	14. Saturday, June 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Snoozing*
> 
> "Hey, silly. You like, wanted to see me again?"
> 
> AAAAAAAAAHHHoh. Jesus, you almost gave me a heart attack there. Yes Phosphora, it's nice having you on board, but this is completely weird. 
> 
> Thanks to the 9 anonymous individuals who thought this story is funny, but that's not a lot of feedback. The comments are open, so share your thought, probe for holes, and ask questions! 
> 
> And Phosphora, I'm ticklish there.

Gaven dreamed of being lifted into heaven, which didn't make sense because he was still healthy and none of the gods he recognized did anything like this. Then he stopped dreaming, woke up, and found the sun lightening up his room. The bedside phone read 9:42, so Gaven ran to put on clothes, and see what the smash mansion was all about now. After stepping over two passed-out women, Gaven came up to the Smash Mansion, only to see some interns start streaming out of it. They were proceeding towards a Knockout venue. Gaven decided that if they were going there, it was probably worthy of his attention. But breakfast first. 

Gaven then opened his two-in-one and got to work. His new project of choice was of a magically-powered interface that could overlay three-dimensional, tangible surfaces onto the real world. Gaven pulled the demo, which consisted of a floating cube that could be translated by putting his right thumb and forefinger together and moving his hand around. This could prove useful in his work if he could get it to work reasonably bug-free, and someone, perhaps he, wrote a program to make use of it. 

===

One of the interns watching matches at Knockout, Lilly, was eager to watch Melee matches. But soon after Lilly stepped foot outside of the mansion, a pair of boys focused on her. 

"Hey look, a geico!"

"That's a gecko, dumbass. Geico is the company that hires them."

"Alright then, a gecko, pedant."

Lilly wanted to just pass by them and ignore them. But they weren't having that. 

"Hey, 15 minutes could do what for me?"

"What do I do?"

"Hey, can you trigger a Neanderthal?"

Lilly quietly disappeared behind a wall, then watched the boys. After trying to figure out where she went, they left for the Melee top 128 matches. Safe, but they might do the same thing if they found her again. 

===

Meanwhile, Ellen had Sara gripping her right hand with both hands. 

"Why?"

"So you don't get raped."

"What?"

"So you don't get raped."

"No, what do you mean I'm going to get raped?"

"You see the crowd? THERE ARE LOTS OF PEOPLE!!! WHO KNOWS WHAT LIBERALS COULD BE HIDING HERE!!"

"Sara, I'm right next to you. There is no need to yell."

Thankfully the crowd didn't notice, as they were too busy watching Mew2king vs Westballz. Mew2king threw out a speedy forcefield that missed Westballz, but since Westballz didn't anticipate it, Mew2king went unpunished and did a wavedash forward, hoping to position himself for a grab. Westballz didn't take it, instead short hopping back and firing a shot. Mew2king spotdodged the shot, then SHFFLed a neutral air, knocking Westballz back. 

===

"Felicia, please leave my room. I have some business to get done. I won't need you for a while, so enjoy your break."

"Yes, Lord Corrin-- oof! Thank goodness I wasn't carrying anything."

After Felicia left Corrin's line of sight, Corrin readied a tablet. It was still a bit weird to use the glowing coal-black slate-shaped object like this, but compared to some of the actual magical stuff he experienced in Nohr, this was relatively straightforward. He tapped a phone icon, then tapped a picture of his sweetheart Camilla, then tapped another phone icon. It was just a week ago that they got the connection set up, and Corrin had previously used it for government purposes, not for this. 

"Good morning Camilla-- wait, isn't bathing something you do in the evening?"

"It is the evening, Corrin. In fact, the sun is setting right now. Should I show you?"

"I trust your words, but do show me anyway."

"How? All I can hear is your sweet voice."

"There should be a picture of a black box with a trapezoid on one side of it. Press it, and we'll be able to see each other. Ah. There we go. Now where is the sunset you mentioned?"

Camilla got out of the baths, and walked up to a window, through which it could be seen that the sun was indeed setting. 

"It's unfortunate that I can't be there with you."

"You might not be sitting alongside me, little dragon, but you said that we could share sights with our slates."

"There should be an icon with two arrows. Press it so I can see through the other side of the tablet. Now hold it upright. A bit more. Yes, that's good, now keep the tablet upright."

Camilla followed his instructions, and Corrin savored the Norhian sunset with his wife. They shared a romantic moment before Elise knocked on the door and shouted, "Camilla! It's my turn to be in the baths now!"

Camilla hurriedly stood up and walked inside before calling back to the door, "Come in. I'm still here, but your brother will be delighted to see you."

"Isn't Big Brother at the smash castle?"

"Your brother is here on this slate."

"So is Siegbert playing castle building with the spare slates? I want to help him!"

"No. Actually he is… just come in. Corrin is doing something you couldn't guess."

Elise then held down the handle and butted into the bath doors. 

"Corrin? Are you hiding? Where aaaare you?"

"Silly Elise. He's actually right here."

"Where?"

Camilla held up her tablet, on which Corrin's video feed was visible. 

"Corrin! EEEEEE!!! There you are!"

Corrin couldn't see Elise in Camilla's video feed, as the active camera lens was facing Camilla's bust rather than Elise. 

"Camilla, yes, the view back there is nice, but I want to see Elise too. You remember the picture with two arrows? Press it again."

It took just a second for Elise to pop into view. Elise was prepared for the baths in the most obvious fashion possible, but Corrin tried to push that out of his mind. 

"Elise! Is everything fine?"

"Yeah! Last week I brought Forrest from the deeprealms. He made a bikini for himself!"

Corrin looked blankly into the lens. A… bikini. Consciously, he knew that Forrest was just being the boy that liked to make and wear girl's clothes, and that was fine, but the mental image created revulsion in him anyway. He tried to clear his mind, but the mental image was still sticking in his mind. So he left for a moment. By the time Corrin was back in the conversation, the camera feed was showing the ceiling of the baths, and Elise and Camilla were talking about him. 

===

Stacy watched as Mr. Game and Watch finished making several pancakes. Her task was to assemble these into dorayaki by spreading red bean paste on each pancake and assembling them together like sandwiches. But first, they had to cool. Stacy put on some plastic gloves and stirred the warm bowl of red bean paste while she waited. 

After picking through the slurry and finding five different pieces of red bean skin during those ten minutes, Stacy methodically prepared the individual pancakes by dispensing a scoop of paste onto each pancake, then going over each one and using the back of the spoon to spread and flatten each mound of red bean paste. 

Stacy wanted first dibs on the fresh dorayaki, but Mr. Game and Watch held out a biting turtle and pointed to the back entrance of the kitchen, where Stacy dropped off her apron and gloves and wandered around the basement floor before finding the dining hall again. 

===

It was easy to watch Knockout matches on her phone. A temporary wifi hotspot was set up near a bathroom, and a sponsored stream was accessible from a Twitch channel, at the moment sponsored by a company selling smart bathtubs known as Royal Flux. But no amount of Knockout sponsorship would feed her food in this bathroom. And lunchtime was fast approaching, putting incredible pressure on her stomach. 

Lilly stepped out of the bathroom, took one look on either side, and walked straight to the Smash Mansion. If she didn't find anything along the way, she could eat lunch there, but if she did, great. 

On her way there, the boys didn't appear, but more than the usual amount of attention was pointed her way. A walrus girl asked her for an autograph, which she declined. A demon with tapeworm hair took a picture with flash, distracting Lilly and prompting her to stop to prevent herself from walking into anything. A human boy waved at her. And then Lilly finally stepped foot in the Mansion. She swiftly made her way to the stairs and climbed down the wall to the dining hall, then obtained a pancake sandwich. 

It was past twelve, and Geico was sponsoring the stream. So that's why. Argh. Those boy's comments made sense now. 

===

Stacy, finally off for lunch, wasn't the first to the new snacks. She thought she would be first, but the tray holding the dorayaki had twenty already gone. She grabbed one, and tried to find the villagers again. Knowing the villagers and their reluctance to speak, she nabbed a sheet of paper from the nearest copy room and a pencil that happened to be on the ground near to it. 

The first villager she could find was the red-shirted villager, and nautrally, this was the villager Stacy talked to. She handed him the paper and pencil, and started asking him questions. 

"Hello, villager. Can I speak to you about something?"

The villager wrote, "Yes, but quickly. I have other things to do."

"So."

Stack swallowed some saliva before continuing her thought. 

"The mafia games were great. Even though I wasn't able to actually play, I watched from the sidelines, and it was full of tension and mindgames, like any good competitive game. Will there be another one?"

The villager wrote, "Sorry, no plans for further Mafia games."

"How about you plan another one right now?"

"Sorry, no can do. I'm busy."

"None of your little villager friends can do it?"

"No. I got to go. Bye."

"Aww… I really wanted to join a Mafia game."

Stack followed the villager back, where she found it meeting with the other villagers. With a map of the second floor of the mansion in hand, they were talking-- talking!-- about what Palutena was most likely planning. The purple-shirted villager found out that Red was going to go back to Kanto, presumably to revisit his home. Though why he'd bring back 255 of the thing he'd bring to it, none of them had an idea. And at that point, the villagers noticed Stacy and quickly shooed her out of their room. 

Dang. Maybe she'd have to create the mafia game herself. A quick flick of a thumb pulled up the wikipedia article for the game, which she read as she walked down the hallway into a wall. 

Back in to the room she shared with Julia, Stacy aired her ideas. Julia noted that Stacy would be able to participate in her own hosted game, and if Julia joined in the hosting, she couldn't play either. 

===

At five, Blaise got back from Knockout. Loser's quarterfinals, Leffen vs. Hungrybox, was hype. Before the match started, Leffen downed a can of Red Bull, courtesy of his sponsors, while Hungrybox shook some hands. When the match started, Leffen repeatedly shot lasers while short hopping to pressure Hungrybox to approach. Hungrybox walked up, perfect shielding laser blasts, but instinctively held shield when Leffen unexpectedly wavelanded out of a short hop and began pillaring down Hungrybox's shield. 

All through the match, Leffen operated his reflector and heat blaster with a technical proficiency exceeding Fox's, and Hungrybox was able to work his way out of Leffen's otherwise-lethal kill confirms, repeatedly. It all came down to the wire, but Leffen was able to catch Hungrybox off guard with a ledge release into a shine spike, sealing a last-stock situation and Leffen's match win. Off the Smash-enhanced stage, Leffen ledge-cancelled a fox illusion from the middle of the stage, then proceeded to waveshine through the middle of the crowd while smirking, while Hungrybox was left drifting through the air to the back exit. 

Blaise found several committed fans of the various Smashers here. Four Mango fans were multishining while holding up the four corners of a “Mango Nation” flag. One Leffen fangirl held up a bullhorn and recited the Bad Guy quote from Wreck-it Ralph verbatim. And Mew2king was going around a crowd of fans holding optical disks, inserting each one into a CD player connected to his forearm, burning them, and returning them to their owners. Blaise retrieved a disk for two dollars, and handed it to Mew2king, then walked back to the Mansion. 

Once back from Knockout, Blaise found both of the Corrins quickly. Though she was off work, she found both Corrins cute, and so she wanted to spend more time with them and get to know them. And then perhaps establish some support levels. 

"Hey, Corrin. What's going around?"

"Finally, you pronounced my name correctly," he mumbled. 

"What?"

"Nothing."

"So anyway, I managed to get this from Knockout."

Blaise pulled out her compact disk from her purse. 

"What's that?"

"Mew2king's autograph."

"No, what's it on?"

"A… I think it's called a CD."

"What does that stand for?"

"I honestly don't know. It appears… that it stands for 'Compact Disk'. Do you want to see?" she asked, observing Corrin's held-out hand and placing it there. 

Corrin looked at the disk for a few seconds, checking both sides, then looking closely to see if the autograph in question was small, lightly colored, or otherwise hard to see. He didn't see it. 

"Where is King Mewtwo's signature?"

Blaise initially looked for her laptop before realizing she didn't bring it down, so she had to settle for a verbal explanation of the technology. 

"It's encoded on the disk as a series of tiny marks on the disk."

Corrin looked even closer at the disk, and converted his eye to a dragon's for its superior vision. 

"No, as in really tiny. You see this human hair? Its width covers one hundred rows of marks on the disk."

Corrin converted back to his human form and handed the disk back to Blaise. 

"Hey, Corrin?"

The other Corrin, sitting across from her, looked up from a bento box, and replied, "Yes, Blaise?"

"I didn't see you there. I was just discussing stuff with your counterpart there."

"No problem."

Then Blaise faced back to the other Corrin. 

"What's that on your arm?"

"Oh, that's just dragon scales. It's typical of dragon halfbreeds."

"No, that red spot. It looks like blood."

"What? Where?"

"It's right… there. On the back of your upper forearm."

Corrin looked there, then kept looking in disbelief. There were scales missing, but there was no pain from the inevitable wound it left. 

"How did someone take scales off of me without causing me pain?"

Blaise took a moment to comfort him, and tell him that everything was fine. 

"Thanks, but no hugs please. These scales are sharp on the inside."

After dinner, Blaise looked up painkilling and dragon scales on Wikipedia. Symptom-free pain relief was achievable with dark magic, and dragon scales were commonly used for divination and high-density information archival. A few fast thumbs told Robin about what she saw. 

===

Out of the Tussle Grand Finals match, Kenjiro tossed his pokeball with a backspin, catching his Blastoise before rolling back into an extended hand. He, or rather his Blastoise, won Grand Finals of this bracket flawlessly, taking advantage of low knockback angles to fiercely guard ledges with powerful jets of water and prevent opponents from making it back onstage, and winning every match. Winner's finals and Grand Finals were difficult, but his Blastoise was able to clutch it out with encouragement and plenty of treats. 

Kenjiro grabbed his trophy, a modest holographic trophy of the first fighter ever tested in Tussle, a modest cube of gelatinous consistency named Hitboxie, and held it up high, with his right hand. With his left hand, he pressed the button on the pokeball, and his Blastoise was able to share most of the moment. 

Right off the stage, he was met by a man in a suit. He introduced himself as a representative of a new competitive team known as Team Luminance, and gave him an application for possible entry into the team. Kenjiro grabbed a sheet, then asked where he should submit it. 

"We recently established headquarters on building 8814, on the crossroads of Twelfth Street and Port Drive. I hope to see you on our team."

Then the man left before Kenjiro could ask any further questions. He looked at the sheet, and thought, "This probably is suspicious, but I'll look inside before I see anything."

===

Walhart and Ricken made it to the main brackets of Smash 4 doubles, but not without incident. In their pools matches, a strong showing in their pools evaporated when Nakat and Keitaro worked together to land a PK Thunder 2 strike on Walhart, leaving Ricken to take a psychic toss straight into the back corner of Final Destination. 

"Good job! I knew you could do it!" Irene shouted as she tackled Walhart. 

Irene, however, didn't jump squarely onto Walhart, but to one side of him, spinning him around and landing both of them on tables. Irene went face first into a giant bowl of leftover Red Bean paste that Palutena was gobbling, while Walhart missed a wall tech and knocked half a row of tables out of alignment before coming to a stop on the floor. 

"Thanks, but I couldn't have done it without my friend."

A small force assembled to right the tables. Samus directed Walhart to join the team, while Irene removed her face from the bowl and stared Palutena right in the face. Palutena simply laughed it off, but Irene ran off in a weird mixture of embarrassment and terror. 

"What does that girl do when you're not around?"

"I... I honestly have no idea either."

===

The two Robins gathered with Dark Pit and Lucas to determine whether they wanted to join the plan between the two. 

"I'm not going to be part of your plan. Leave me out," Dark Pit replied. 

"Aaah, I can look around, but I won't be doing anything with you," Lucas said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who aren't signed up for an esports team:
> 
>   * Paranoid Sara is best Sara, but I've tried my best to make her a bit redeemable. Hopefully it'll show better soon. 
>   * The CD mark size comparison is off by about 25%-- not bad for someone that hasn't looked it up.
>   * The meanings of the other names were accidental. This time around, I dug for a name with a meaning, and got Kenjiro. Look it up. Or don't. 
> 


**Author's Note:**

> ...At the rate I'm proceeding at this work, I don't think I'll make it through the other end without someone else working with me. Anyone?


End file.
